Atrium Health, Inc.

Integrating the Season Health clinical nutrition program into the Xealth digital health platform streamlines provider referral flow, increasing access and improving outcomes MILWAUKEE and SEATTLE, Oct. 21, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Xealth, the leader in enabling digital health at scale, today announced that the Froedtert & The Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) health network is leveraging its digital health platform to engage select patient populations with Season Health, the leading clinical nutrition provider. Through Xealth’s digital health platform, the Froedtert & MCW will offer Season Health's scalable, clinically-driven nutrition services to employee and patient populations, starting with a focus on patients with diabetes. This collaboration aims to improve clinical outcomes by integrating nutrition as a critical element of chronic condition care. “As a health system, we are always looking for ways to connect our patients with the right resources to improve lives,” said Bradley Crotty, MD, MPH Chief Medical Officer of Inception Health, the innovation arm of the Froedtert & MCW health network; and Associate Professor of Medicine, MCW. “Using the Season Health program, we want to make it easier for people living with chronic conditions, like diabetes, to stay connected with their nutrition and care between appointments to improve their health, including A1c and blood sugar levels. Including it on our digital health platform makes it a more seamless process for our clinical team and improves the program’s impact.” Outcomes of chronic conditions can often be impacted by diet. Season’s programs include one-on-one, virtual, medical nutrition therapy visits from Season’s network of Registered Dietitians, home delivery of affordable medically-tailored meals and groceries, an accredited Diabetes Self Management and Education (DSME) program, and an integrated benefits bank that supports patients in accessing available health plan-sponsored food benefits and government programs. By connecting this program into the clinical record via Xealth, eligible patients are easily identified, with no extra steps from the care team. Xealth facilitates outreach, coming from the Froedtert & MCW health network, and offers deeper insight into program enrollment and engagement. “It’s broadly accepted that improper nutrition complicates chronic conditions and that is impacted by several factors,” said Josh Hix, CEO and co-founder of Season. “Our work with Xealth is critical for two reasons: it makes the referral process that much easier on Froedtert providers and allows us to proactively target and outreach to the patients we believe will benefit most from our care. Overall, this leads to increased access to high quality nutrition services that complement the care patients receive from their Froedtert care team.” The Froedtert & MCW health network has been using the Xealth digital health platform, which is integrated into its EHR system, since early 2018. Season is the 11th digital health partner that the health system has added to this platform, which covers a variety of clinical areas, including mental health, maternity, diabetes and others. “Digital programs scale clinical resources and may improve patient outcomes by engaging them in their care between appointments, especially in areas that require daily decisions, such as nutrition,” said Mike McSherry, CEO and co-founder of Xealth. “By leveraging Xealth’s connected platform for its digital health programs, including Season Health, the Froedtert & MCW health network strengthens the impact of these initiatives for more patients in a way that is nearly seamless to medical providers.” Xealth is the driving force behind digital health programs at many of the nation’s largest health systems, bringing digital health vendors, programs, therapeutics and tools into clinical and patient workflow. When combined with the company’s custom data and analytics, health systems can track, analyze and evaluate everything through their digital health integration platform. About The Froedtert & the Medical College of WisconsinThe Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin health network is a partnership between Froedtert Health and the Medical College of Wisconsin supporting a shared mission of patient care, innovation, medical research and education. Our health network operates eastern Wisconsin's only academic medical center and adult Level I Trauma Center at Froedtert Hospital, Milwaukee, an internationally recognized training and research center engaged in thousands of clinical trials and studies. The Froedtert & MCW health network, which includes 10 hospital locations, more than 2,300 physicians and more than 45 health centers and clinics, draws patients from throughout the Midwest and the nation. In our most recent fiscal year, outpatient visits were more than 1.6 million, inpatient admissions to our hospitals exceeded 57,500 and visits to our network physicians totaled more than 1.28 million. About Season HealthSeason Health is a national practice of Registered Dietitians; our providers our powered by the Season Health technology platform, which supports our patients with a personal nutrition prescription, hundreds of thousands of healthy meal and grocery options (all of which can be delivered directly to their home) and integrated Benefits Bank, which supports patients in accessing health plan benefits that subsidize health food. Season partners with leading health systems across the country as an extension of their care teams, acting as an integrated, comprehensive outpatient nutrition vertical for hospitals. By increasing access to longitudinal nutrition care, Season drives improved clinical and quality outcomes, while driving increased patient engagement within the health system footprint. Learn more at www.seasonhealth.com About XealthXealth scales digital health programs, enabling clinicians to integrate, prescribe and monitor digital health tools for patients to drive engagement and utilization. Through the secure Xealth platform, clinicians can find and order the right digital health tools and programs for patients directly from the EHR workflow, send these digital health orders to the patient’s email or patient portal, and then monitor activity. Xealth spun out of Providence St. Joseph Health (PSJH) in 2017, and investors include Advocate Aurora Enterprises, Atrium Health, Cleveland Clinic, MemorialCare Innovation Fund, Cerner, McKesson Ventures, Novartis, Philips, and ResMed as well as Providence Ventures, UPMC and the Froedtert and Medical College of Wisconsin Health Network. For more information, visit www.xealth.com or follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter. Contact:Heather Caouette508-579-3894heatherc@rae-communications.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/026b5e41-1c77-47b8-9ebf-9b9e5a4aa5c7

A little less than a year ago, the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs announced its Veteran Interoperability Pledge – an effort to boost information exchange between its own facilities and participating health systems, with the aim of improving care coordination for veterans receiving care at both the VA and in their communities. More than a dozen major health systems – Emory Healthcare, Inova, Jefferson Health, Sanford Health, UC Davis, Intermountain, Mass General Brigham, Rush Health, Tufts Medicine, Marshfield Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, UPMC and Atrium Health – signed on to the pledge, promising to support its three chief objectives: Accurately identifying veterans when they seek care from private-sector providers. Connecting them with VA and community resources that promote health, especially services that lower their out-of-pocket expenses. Coordinating care for shared patients, whether they're enrolled in VA health benefits or not, by exchanging information about care requested and provided. The health systems agreed to enable health system access to: authoritative VA resources for determining veteran status; automation of benefit eligibility determination and referrals; access to identify local, state and federal health resources; clinical and administrative data for quality assessment and care coordination. They also promised to advance their own implementations of national interoperability standards and privacy and security frameworks related to the exchange and use of health information. This week, the Interoperability Pledge got another big boost – with both Epic and Oracle Health promising that all of their hospital clients will also be able to connect to VA systems for more efficient data sharing. In a Sept. 18 LinkedIn post , Dr. Shereef Elnahal, Under Secretary for Health at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, announced the big news that "as of today," all of the hospital clients of those two major electronic health record vendors "can connect to VA systems to identify veterans and connect them to earned benefits." Capitalizing on the promise of open application programing interfaces, both companies "have made code available to ALL of their hospital and health system customers allowing them to identify Veterans in their workflow by connecting to VA's open API system," said Elnahal. He also offered an update on how some of the participating health systems have advanced interoperability goals since the pledge was first announced in October 2023. Sanford Health, for instance, has identified 12,000 veteran patients using the open API, and is now able to connect them with information that outlines all of the healthcare and benefits they are entitled to through the VA, he said. Tufts Medicine, meanwhile, is using the API tool to "identify veterans in suicidal crisis in their emergency room, connecting them to free coverage by VA for that care and, most importantly, notifying the Boston VA medical center that a Veteran is in need for crucial follow-up care," said Elnahal. Marshfield Clinic too has "connected thousands of Veterans with information on their earned benefits under the PACT Act ," he said. In a separate announcement, Oracle Health applauded Marshfield's early adoption of the API code package, and encouraged its other EHR customers to download and install the code package for free and implement it using their internal IT teams. "Enabling data to flow with the patient through their healthcare journey is essential and, in some cases, lifesaving," said Seema Verma, general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences , in a statement. "Patients should be confident that any provider they visit can access their records and medical history to help ensure timely and accurate care, and Oracle Health is working to make this a reality for all U.S. veterans." This past month, Epic highlighted its own recent work on standards-based interoperability beyond its own customer footprint. "We've opened up an API so that our customers can allow patients to connect with apps outside of the Epic system," said Matt Doyle, Epic's interoperability software development lead. Mike Miliard is executive editor of Healthcare IT News Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.

Atrium Health announced on its website Friday that it is sending notifications to certain patients and staff who may have been affected by a malicious email sent to some of the health system’s employees on April 29. The Charlotte, North Carolina-based health system noted that its electronic medical records are separate from its email system and were unaffected by the incident. WHY IT MATTERS Part of Advocate Health, the third-largest nonprofit health system in the United States, Atrium recently learned that an unauthorized third party accessed a limited number of employee email accounts through the original phish sent on April 29. Based on an ongoing investigation, the health system said that it appears the unauthorized party had access to the affected account for one day, until April 30. The health system said that the activity of the unauthorized third party was not focused on medical or health information content in the employee email boxes. Atrium, which operates in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, is mailing notification letters to patients and employees whose personal information could have potentially been exposed in the incident. Information that may have been accessed in the social engineering attack includes: First and/or last name. Street address. Email address. Social Security number. Date of birth. Medical record number. Driver’s license or state-issued identification number. Bank or financial account numbers or information. Treatment/diagnosis. Prescription. Health insurance and/or treatment cost information, such as patient identification numbers and health insurance account or policy numbers. To minimize the risk of similar incidents, Atrium said it is providing additional phishing training and education to its employees and complimentary credit monitoring and identity protection services to those who were involved in the attack. THE LARGER TREND The most popular style of attack, phishing emails can open up access to employees' email accounts, and threat actors can then pivot to attack networks, reimbursement payment systems and more. Threat actors also target health information technology help desks posing as employees in order to trigger password resets for employees' accounts. In June, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Health and Human Services released an advisory about cyber threat actors using email and telephone calls in attempts to steal healthcare payments. The FBI and HHS said that, after claiming to be revenue cycle or administrator employees to gain access, they diverted legitimate payments. "Phishing is the most common way that hackers gain access to healthcare systems to steal sensitive data and health information," Melanie Fontes Rainer, director of the Office for Civil Rights, said in December when OCR settled its first data breach settlement under HIPAA for a phishing attack . While "Atrium apologizes after email scam fools workers," noted a report in The Charlotte Observer , the rise of generative artificial intelligence has only enhanced attacks , improving the quality and quantity of phishing emails. ON THE RECORD "Atrium Health is unaware of any attempted or actual misuse of patient or personal information and there is no evidence any personal information was viewed as a result of the phishing attack," the provider said in a statement. Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News. Email: afox@himss.org Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication. The HIMSS Healthcare Cybersecurity Forum is scheduled to take place October 31-November 1 in Washington, D.C. Learn more and register .