Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1393415
59 INNOVATION Banner Health launches digital health program with Cerner, Providence spinoff Xealth By Jackie Drees B anner Health launched a digital health program with Xealth to scale digi- tal therapeutics and remote monitoring services across the Phoenix-based health system and its Cerner EHR, the companies announced May 20. Five things to know: 1. Cerner and investment firm LRVHealth invested $6 million in Xealth as part of a collaboration in August 2020 to give patients access to their digital data and improve engagement with their treatment plans. 2. Cerner and Xealth expanded their partnership in December to add digital order- ing and monitoring capabilities, which are available in a single location in the Cern- er EHR where health systems can use apps based on clinical and financial metrics. 3. Banner Health is rolling out the platform across its 30 hospitals and additional facilities starting with Babyscripts, a virtual care platform for managing obstetrics. 4. Babyscripts is available to obstetricians and family practitioners across Banner Health; the platform manages remote monitoring and lets patients complete pre- natal visits remotely, when possible. Patients also can share biometrics such as weight and blood pressure data with providers through the EHR. 5. Renton, Wash.-based Providence spun off Xealth in 2017; the company pow- ers digital health tools focusing on patient education, remote monitoring, virtual care and more. n 'We're not looking to compete with doctors': Microsoft exec on $20B Nuance acquisition By Jackie Drees W hile Microsoft's $19.7 billion acquisition of speech recognition compa- ny Nuance Communications is poised to increase its healthcare foot- print, the tech giant said it is not interested in automating everything physicians do, according to a May 25 CNBC report. "We're not looking to compete with doctors or healthcare providers," Scott Guth- rie, Microsoft's executive vice president for cloud and artificial intelligence, told the network. "We want to make them more successful." In April, Microsoft announced the pending acquisition as a way to expand its healthcare offerings for its cloud products. Nuance has integrations with EHR ven- dors Epic and Cerner, among others, so the acquisition will help Microsoft break into the voice assistant's business selling software to hospitals and health systems, analysts and healthcare executives. Microsoft isn't immediately interested in certain human medical processes that can be automated, such as developing tools to ask patients questions that help with disease diagnosis and detecting cancer by analyzing medical images, according to the report. Microsoft said it views the acquisition as an opportunity to expand its total ad- dressable market in healthcare to $500 billion. The deal is expected to close by the end of 2021, CNBC reported. n Boston Children's, Google create tool that maps out 'vaccine deserts' By Jackie Drees B oston Children's Hospital, Google and Ariadne Labs launched an in- teractive, data-driven vaccine eq- uity planning tool June 9 to help officials locate "vaccine deserts," or places with limited access to COVID-19 vaccines. e Vaccine Equity Planner overlays mil- lions of data points on a U.S. map to give users information needed to pinpoint vac- cine deserts, target potential vaccination sites within these low-access areas and model the most effective sites to open to reach vulnerable populations. e tool uses data from VaccineFinder and Google on more than 50,000 vaccina- tion sites, in addition to travel time data from Google, the CDC's social vulnerabil- ity index and data on vaccination intent from Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Mellon University's COVID-19 Symptom Survey. Users can also select the mode of trans- portation they want to use and the time they think people should have to trav- el to get a vaccine to identify where the deserts are. Users can also measure other risks/barriers to equity that populations face, such as number of unvaccinated people in the area, social vulnerability or intent to vaccinate. "We know that inequities exist in our healthcare infrastructure, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only cast a brighter light on those inequities," John Brownstein, PhD, chief innovation of- ficer at Boston Children's Hospital, said in a news release. "e Vaccine Equity Planner aims to identify vaccine deserts, areas with low access to COVID-19 vacci- nation sites, so public health officials and decision makers can intentionally place future vaccination sites in these areas to offer more equitable access to COVID-19 vaccinations for all populations." n