Veradigm shakes up its leadership – and adds generative AI
Shih-Yin Ho, director of Veradigm's board of directors, will serve as interim CEO of the company following the departure last Friday of CEO Richard Poulton.
Lee Westerfield, the Chief Financial Officer at Clearsense, will serve as interim Chief Financial Officer of Veradigm, replacing CFO Leah Jones, who also resigned at the request of the board of directors.
Veradigm's board has appointed Greg Garrison as its new executive chairman and Carol Zierhoffer as its lead independent director.
WHY IT MATTERS
Veradigm announced Friday that its board of directors has asked Poulton and Jones to resign over issues related to “financial reporting and internal controls over financial reporting and disclosure controls.” announced Friday.
Nasdaq did Reportedly Veradigm said earlier this year that the company was in non-compliance with listing rules because the company failed to file an annual report for the year ending December 31, 2022, as well as the quarterly report for the period ending March 31.
Veradigm said in a statement that it is committed to regaining compliance with the Nasdaq Listing Rule.
“Veradigm's core businesses remain strong, but after careful review and consideration it is clear that we must develop a stronger financial control environment with improved financial reporting and disclosure policies and procedures,” said Garrison, a senior leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers for more than two decades, in the statement.
He added that “the leadership changes announced on December 8 reflect the importance of accountability in achieving that goal.”
Ho, now serving as interim CEO, noted that the company's operations, scale, data analytics and expertise are well positioned to drive value for patients and shareholders.
Garrison said Veradigm's new leaders, along with Langan, have the “deep experience” to guide the company through the shakeup.
The company has initiated a search process for a permanent CEO and CFO and will hire an executive search firm to support the vetting of both internal and external candidates, according to the leadership transition announcement.
THE BIG TREND
In separate news Monday, Veradigm unveiled its new conversational artificial intelligence agent for its Practice Fusion Billing Services product through an integration with Microsoft and Zammo.ai's Azure-based software solution, a software-as-a-service accelerator.
The generative AI agent answers questions based on feedback from the Practice Fusion Electronic Health Records platform.
“Through our partnership with Veradigm and the power of Microsoft Azure AI capabilities, we are helping to accelerate innovation and transform the way physicians within the Veradigm network get answers and solve billing problems,” Tyler Bryson, corporate vice president of U.S. healthcare and public sector. for Microsoft, said in that announcement.
Veradigm – what was once Allscripts – had previously undergone more than five years of business streamlining and leadership changes.
In 2018, Allscripts acquired cloud-based Practice Fusion for $100 million. The following year it paid more than that to settle pre-existing anti-kickback charges against the company.
In March 2022, the EHR vendor sold its hospitals and large physician practices business segment, including Allscripts' Sunrise, Paragon, TouchWorks, Opal and dbMotion tools. It previously acquired 2bPrecise, a technology company that specializes in collecting genetic and genomic data from EHRs.
In May, Paul Black, who was CEO of Allscripts for ten years, stepped down.
Poulton, who was named new CEO of the revamped company, said Veradigm represented approximately 95% of Allscript's consolidated revenue, which was reported to be $136 million, up $10 million from the same period in 2021.
ON THE RECORD
“Together, we will continue to execute on this strategy and further invest in analytical capabilities that are critical to meeting our customers' growing needs for high-quality data to support their delivery of great care, value and research to patients,” Ho said on December 8 in announcing Veradigm's leadership change. “The company has tremendous potential to shape the future for suppliers, payers and life sciences customers.”
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.