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Men, on average, earned $126,262, compared to $100,762 for women in the survey of 1,900 healthcare professionals that includes CEOs, CIOs, IT project managers and other titles.

The $157 million program will assess the housing instability, hunger and violence facing underprivileged patients, with the hope of directing patients to community-based services

Navigant Consulting has acquired revenue cycle-focused McKinnis Consulting Services for $49 million in cash and $3 million in common stock, the companies announced on Monday. The deal means more than 70 of McKinnis’ consultants will join Navigant, and all three McKinnis founders, James McHugh, Timothy Kinney, and John Morris, will join Navigant’s revenue cycle leadership team.  Chicago-based McKinnis Consulting Services offers revenue cycle assessment services to clients including academic medical centers, health systems and physicians groups. Navigant is a global firm with clients in the healthcare, energy and financial services industries offering professional services in areas including financial planning, risk management and business process management. “The McKinnis transaction is purpose-driven to expand our RCM capabilities at a time when health system margins are under greater scrutiny,” said David Zito, managing director and Navigant healthcare segment leader.  “The McKinnis professionals, which include the firm’s founders, further complement our ability to help clients navigate through the disruptions in the healthcare sector.” McKinnis has worked with major health systems including Indiana’s Parkview Health, which it helped manage through its Epic electronic health records integration, and John Muir Health in California, which it helped overhaul its revenue cycle systems. In fact, Mckinnis said it helped John Muir see a 98 percent increase in self-pay yield, 9 percent increase in third-party liability yield and a 20 percent increase in point-of-service cash collections. Twitter: @BethJSanborn

NantHealth on Tuesday announced plans to acquire Boston-based NaviNet, wrapping up what it called a 10-year plan for the tech firm, CEO Patrick Soon-Shiong, MD, said. Under terms of the deal, NantWorks, a holding company, and its majority-owned subsidiary NantHealth, are buying NaviNet for an undisclosed sum. The deal gives NantHealth entry into the payer market and strengthens its personalized medicine goals. NaviNet is known for its payer-provider collaboration technology. NantVentures, the private equity arm of NantWorks participated in the financing. “The acquisition of NaviNet completes our 10-year vision at NantWorks and NantHealth to integrate and coordinate our complex healthcare ecosystem from the knowledge domain, to the care delivery domain and now to the payer domain, as a single sign-on, seamless, cloud-based, secure adaptive learning system for patients, payers, and providers,” Soon-Shiong, founder and CEO of NantHealth, said in statement. The billionaire entrepreneur is quoted in the Los Angeles Business Journal as saying a public offering for NantHealth, which had been planned for last year, had been delayed pending the acquisition and integration of NaviNet. The acquisition continues NantHealth’s vision of delivering on whole health systems integration and revolutionizing the patient-clinician experience by bringing real-time molecular and evidence-based insights to the point of care, he said. NaviNet has a customer base of more than 40 health plans and nationwide network of more than 450,000 users. Its All-Payer Access provider portal connects more than 450 commercial and government plans via NaviNet Open, its payer-provider collaboration platform. “This cloud-based system allows provider access to over 90 percent of covered lives in the United States and will serve as a transformative platform for the communication of cutting-edge knowledge to all,” said Soon-Shiong. “By combining NaviNet Open’s applications – eligibility and benefits from more than 450 commercial and government plans, referrals, authorizations, document exchange, claims management, and more – with NantHealth’s interoperability, decision support and connectivity platforms and with NantOmics supercomputer predictive modeling platforms, we are now poised to be the nation's leading healthcare collaboration network by transforming the payer-provider relationship to evolve from transactions to interactions and finally to collaboration,” he added NantHealth will be able to leverage NaviNet’s nationwide network across more than 170,000 active provider offices and 2,000 hospital settings to reach more doctors with genomics, decision support and connectivity solutions to enable better care coordination at lower costs for patients. “Our dream was to address the cognitive overload that faces clinicians today especially in the complexity of cancer, and support community oncologists as well as major academic centers,” he said. “Finally, we have the infrastructure in place to make this a reality.” Twitter: @HealthITNews

The money allocated to VistA comes within $6 billion in discretionary spending for projects including cutting its huge backlog of disability claims

The rule change enables providers to show the identities of patients subject to a federal mental health prohibitor for gun possession.

Healthfinch, which owns the prescription refill application Swoop, has landed $7.5 million in its first round of funding to bankroll the development of its new practice automation platform "Charlie." Investment firm Adams Street Partners led the funding, with participation from JumpStart Ventures, Chicago Ventures, OCA Ventures, Abundant Ventures and a private investor. This funding round takes healthfinch's total raised to more than $10 million since the company, founded by CEO Jonathan Baran and Chief Medical Officer Lyle Berkowitz, launched in 2011. "The rapid adoption and demand from health systems for Swoop is a clear indication that automating routine and repeatable tasks is the future of healthcare delivery,” said Baran in a statement. “To this end, we're moving beyond individual applications in favor of a robust practice automation platform that can handle many more tasks beyond prescription refill requests including visit planning, patient communication and much more."   Investment firms such as Adams Street Partners have been quick to recognize healthfinch's vision and its ability to execute for customers, said Tom Bremner, partner at Adams Street, in a statement. "Healthfinch represents a very strategic and promising addition to our investment portfolio,” he said, “They have what we deem to be a winning trifecta: strong clinical and executive leadership, a compelling product roadmap that will bring clear value to the healthcare system, and most importantly, clients who have been using healthfinch products to achieve up to 5X efficiency and financial ROI." Baran and his executive team, including Chief Operating Officer Sanaz Cordes, and Chief Technology Officer Jonathan Broad, will use Series A funds to add to their technical and clinical teams to accelerate development of the Charlie platform and expedite delivery to health systems, they said. Baran first made his pitch for automating physician tasks in September 2012 at athenahealth’s annual MDP (More Disruption Please) Conference in Northport, Maine. "Half of all primary care physicians are burnt out," Baron told the audience. "So this is on us” to "automate and delegate." “We’re burning out the doctors. And we can’t have happy patients and good health systems if we don’t have happy providers, said Cordez, speaking at the Venture+ Forum at HIMSS15. Twitter: @HealthITNews

New college graduates entering the lucrative mobile app economy earn about $99,000 per year on average, more than double the average salary that a typical new grad earns, according to a new report from ACT/The App Association. As a result, the booming market is giving healthcare professionals a steadily increasing number of new and potentially lucrative job opportunities. “Changes in the regulatory landscape have created new opportunities for connected health companies,” said Morgan Reed, executive director of ACT/The App Association, in a statement. “With healthcare providers shifting from fee-for-service to value-based payments, growth will continue in key areas including chronic condition management, personal fitness and wellness, and remote patient monitoring.” Mobile apps are poised to have a profound impact this year on the $3 trillion healthcare industry, the report titled “State of the App Economy” found. For example, 86 percent of clinicians say mobile apps will be central to patient health by 2020; the connected health market will reach $117 billion by 2020; and the remote patient monitoring market will reach $46 billion by 2017. The so-called app economy is a $120 billion ecosystem worldwide. While 74 percent of app companies are in the United States, 82 percent are startups or small businesses and 82 percent are located outside of Silicon Valley in both urban and rural areas. The research also determined that 68 percent of app companies have unfilled positions – and that number is growing. App businesses typically start out very small. Those that achieve success suddenly are in need of various types of professionals to manage and take the business to the next level of growth. Top skills in demand are: developer, marketing, engineering, business development, human resources, customer service, finance and legal expertise. These professionals can be seasoned executives or new college graduates. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT

Avera McKennan Hospital and University Health Center, the largest private employer in South Dakota, has reached Stage 7 on the HIMSS Analytics Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model. By achieving Stage 7, the highest level on the EMRAM scale measuring healthcare organization implementation and use of EHRs, Avera McKennan joins an elite crowd. During the second quarter of 2015, only 3.7 percent of the more than 5,400 U.S. hospitals in the HIMSS Analytics Database reached Stage 7.  “Our staff have been working diligently to implement a fully integrated electronic medical record across the Avera system,” Dave Kapaska, regional president and CEO of Avera McKennan, said in a statement.  Avera McKennan is an integrated health system composed of more than 330 locations in 100 communities in a five-state region and employs 6,000 staff and physicians.  Calling the health system “an incredibly innovative organization that is truly enabling their broad mission with information technology,” HIMSS Analytics executive vice president John Hoyt pointed to Avera McKennan’s e-health outreach practices, HIE connections spanning 40 states, and cutting-edge use of pharmacogenomics as some of the factors making it a leader in the field. HIMSS Analytics developed the EMR Adoption Model in 2005 as a methodology for evaluating the progress and impact of electronic medical record systems for hospitals in the HIMSS Analytics Database. The validation process to confirm a hospital has reached Stage 7 includes a site visit by an executive from HIMSS Analytics and former or current chief information officers to ensure an unbiased evaluation of the Stage 7 environments. Avera McKennan will be recognized at the 2016 HIMSS Conference and Exhibition, which runs from Feb. 29 to March 4 at the Venetian – Palazzo – Sands Expo Center in Las Vegas. Twitter: @HealthITNews

Platform mimics an in-person interaction between clinician and patient, company executives said.