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Kevin Roche

The Healthy Skeptic is a website about the health care system, and is written by Kevin Roche, who has many years of experience working in the health industry through Roche Consulting, LLC. Mr. Roche is available to assist health care companies through consulting arrangements and may be reached at khroche@healthy-skeptic.com.

Apr 15 2019

An interesting piece of research in Health Services Research looked at the relationship between which party controlled state government and nursing home financial performance, finding that Democratic control increased nursing homes profits without and improvement in outcomes, while Republican control led to lower revenues and profits, and was associated with a shift from Medicaid to private-pay patients.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1475-6773.13061
Apr 15 2019

Catalent, which offers comprehensive drug development and commercialization services, is acquiring Paragon Bioservices for $1.2 billion, adding expertise in manufacturing gene therapies.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/contract-drug-manufacturer-catalent-to-buy-paragon-bioservices-in-1-2-billion-deal-11555277951
Apr 12 2019

Cityblock has secured an additional $65 million in funding to continue opening clinics to provide medical and mental health services in low income neighborhoods.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/11/public-health-startup-cityblock-raises-65m-series-b/
Apr 11 2019

Circling investors for support of its business of clinical data integration, Diameter Health triangulates on a new set of funders, hoping to grow geometrically with $9.6 million in fresh capital.

https://medcitynews.com/2019/04/clinical-data-integration-startup/?utm_campaign=MCN%20Daily%20Top%20Stories&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=71661012&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_JKFRai_qWiiwajNgkfZ7HGhppGGAzIV0vtlHi72KcDhdzHGTHIOW-PaJ8H_7ravLMlni81JkvwehhDvmM2fVLbU6MvW7qCAaVb5a6x-KQbRrGjjg&_hsmi=71661012
Apr 10 2019

A study from Spain in Health Service Research finds that stratifying patients with multimorbidities using a common risk scoring tool, and applying a comprehensive care intervention to the higher risk patients, reduced hospitalizations, but does not give any information on whether the intervention was cost effective, which I doubt since only 9% of hospitalizations were avoided and these interventions are quite expensive.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1475-6773.13094
Apr 10 2019

Strive Health successfully competes for a new round of financing for its kidney care business.

https://www.pehub.com/2019/04/new-kidney-care-company-strive-health-grabs-funding/
Apr 09 2019

Two EMR and practice management companies are joining forces, maybe so they can sink together, as DocuTAP and Practice Velocity merge their businesses.  EMR companies face a new round of consolidation as the land grab is over, doctors are fed up with lousy systems and high prices, and value is non-existent.

https://medcitynews.com/2019/04/docutap-practice-velocity-merge/?utm_campaign=MCN%20Daily%20Top%20Stories&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=71576404&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_J3VDE03UOHGPNOdFmsnJkKTlZTQIdj2GpRGsoFRVgPWFG30bG7cvOrXFYTT_5nsqi50s6Rnm6iLbNlescxt7LHLwb6XEDiWgb-xwT19ZRXrIR44w&_hsmi=71576404
Apr 05 2019

Verily, verily, I say unto you that HealthVerity truthfully (hopefully) raises $25 million in new capital to support its patient information and identity management products.  Seriously, it is amazing how much money has to be spend in health care just to identify that a patient is the same patient in multiple information systems.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190403005862/en/HealthVerity-Announces-25-Million-Series-Funding