"Our full year revenue of $366 million was in line with our previously communicated guidance range, and we’re pleased to have delivered the highest full year revenue in our history following a record 2020," said Juergen Stark, CEO and Chairman, Turtle Beach Corporation. "This success is a testament to our team’s disciplined management and execution through supply chain and logistics headwinds, our active global coordination with retailers, and the consistent and robust demand for our products.
"Our brands, now spanning seven market categories, have enabled us to deliver strong results despite supply chain challenges and semiconductor constraints that complicated operations and held back full year sales. For example, we gained share with our ROCCAT PC accessories across our core PC accessory markets, outperforming the competition as we continued to rapidly grow our PC business. Per U.S. NPD retail data, we maintained our console gaming headset market share of 40% or more for the 12th consecutive year.
"In 2021, we continued our transformation into a diversified gaming accessories business positioning us to take advantage of a growing total addressable market of $8.8 billion. Our success was driven in part by our entry into new product categories like Xbox gaming controllers and flight simulation hardware, while continuing as the clear leader in console gaming headsets. Further, we delivered 20% of revenues outside our core console headset business and expect to deliver $100 million of non-console-headset revenue in 2022, demonstrating our progress in successfully adding attractive categories to our business. Our best-in-class product portfolio, combined with a proven ability to navigate market challenges and execute on our strategy, gives us confidence in our ability to continue to drive long term growth and attractive returns for our shareholders."
2022 Outlook
For the full year 2022, the Company expects revenue to be approximately flat, plus or minus 5%, from record 2021 revenues. The mid-point of the range anticipates growth in sell-through and share gains in all categories offset by a reduction in channel inventory and the expectation that console and PC markets may decline somewhat from 2021 primarily due to an exceptionally strong first half of 2021 driven by stimulus checks and stay-at-home orders.
Gross margins are expected to be roughly 2-3% below our mid 30’s target range, reflecting the impact of 3-4% in higher freight and component costs which we anticipate will abate somewhat over time, as well as the expected return to normal promotional levels, partially offset by factoring higher costs into new product pricing.
Given the impact of higher costs on gross margin this year, we expect our adjusted EBITDA margin to be within the range of approximately 9% to 11%, within or slightly below our 10+% target, due to the factors stated above. Net income per diluted share is expected to be within the range of $0.70 to $1.20 based upon 17.5 million diluted shares for 2022.
Conference Call Details
Turtle Beach Corporation will hold a conference call today, March 2, 2022, at 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time (5:00 p.m. Eastern Time) to discuss its fourth quarter and full year 2021 results.
Chairman and CEO Juergen Stark and CFO John Hanson will host the call, followed by a question-and-answer session.
Conference Call Details: Date: Wednesday, March 2, 2022 Time: 5:00 p.m. ET / 2:00 p.m. PT Toll-Free Dial-in Number: (877) 303-9855 International Dial-in Number: (408) 337-0154 Conference ID: 8270996
For the conference call, please dial-in 5-10 minutes prior to the start time and an operator will register your name and organization. If you have any difficulty with the conference call, please contact Gateway Investor Relations at (949) 574-3860.
The conference call will be broadcast live and available for replay here and via the investor relations section of the Company’s website at www.turtlebeachcorp.com.
I n spite of the conflict surrounding them, Valery Zukin, MD, PhD, CEO of a private maternity hospital in western Kyiv -- just 5 to 10 kilometers from the "zone of fire" -- said staff have no choice but to continue to work.
Over the prior 4 days, doctors, nurses, midwives, and cooks have stayed overnight at the hospital. Some doctors and nurses have brought their children as well. "And for this moment, we must stay like big family," Zukin told MedPage Today in a phone call Saturday evening.
Life has changed dramatically for Ukrainians in only a few days, he said.
"We could not imag[ine] for example that few days ago ... we live by another life," he told MedPage Today. "If for example you must stay in your working place without change. You could not go at home [without] special permission. You couldn't go in the shop because all [of] the shop[s] are closed. You could not move by the car ... and you must go according to some signal in the shelter and you never could imag[ine] it will happen during the day or during the night. You understand that it is a very stress[ful] situation."
Because moving around Kyiv is "absolutely forbidden," the hospital must work with police to inform different posts throughout the city when a patient needs to be moved into or out of the hospital.
Zukin compares life in the hospital underground to working on a Navy boat. To maintain a sense of structure and calm, "all the [crew] they stay on the ship all the time but they have some working hours and some ... sleeping, resting hours," he said. A psychologist is available to do Skype consultations to help staff cope with the new stressors.
As of Saturday, Zukin said there were around 60 doctors, nurses, and midwives and around 25 patients and 17 babies in the hospital.
"We have a lot of Ukrainian patient[s] from [other] cities, and for this moment, we must care for all of these people, for all of these babies," he said.
Zukin spoke with a man whose wife had just given birth in the hospital a few days earlier. He is Italian, she is Ukrainian, and they have an apartment in Kiev, but it's on the 21st floor. Until he finds a way to leave Ukraine, the husband wants his wife to stay in the hospital.
"She has no good place to go," Zukin said.
The hospital is not only serving pregnant women and mothers, but also wounded patients.
"Everyday we have eight, ten of our soldiers," he said, clarifying that these aren't members of the Ukrainian military but volunteers for the territorial defense, who arrive with head wounds, chest wounds, and injuries to their hands and legs.
Because the hospital has something known as GCI certification, all of the doctors are trained to provide basic life support, which is akin to military medicine. So, a patient with a brain injury can be sent to the neurological hospital, but the staff there can help with the initial primary medical care.
"We have very qualified anesthesiologist and very qualified anesthesiologist nurses," and can provide the necessary care, he said.
Last week, Zukin said his staff shared a post on Facebook calling for help with supplies, and strangers brought them food, water, and medications.
A car came and delivered their dinner the other night. He initially thought the delivery was from an organized charity group but it was actually a private restaurant.
"You understand that is not safe to come now in our part of Kyiv," he said, moved by the gesture.
President Putin's "big mistake" Zukin said, has been to underestimate Ukrainians' commitment to freedom.
"I promise [the driver] that we will celebrate our win in this restaurant [with] the staff who stay now in the hospital," he said.
This was a light and hopeful moment for Zukin, but everyone is struggling.
"I think that everyday [we are] waiting, it is a problem for Ukraine," he said, and each day more soldiers are killed.
"I think that this war must be killed in the embryonic stage," he said, comparing it to fire, as it grows "more and more it will be more difficult to stop." If the West continues to ignore Putin, WWII will repeat itself, he said.
"We hope that all of this movement against Russia it will be very quick. ... Ukraine is not so powerful country but in spite of this, the general feeling of all the people is to defend their country, their democracy," he said.
"We hope for the support of United States and Western Europe," Zukin added. "Without support we could not survive and we could not win."
The national pediatric hospital in Kyiv, Ukraine, where onco-ophthalmologist Lesia Lysytsia, MD, works has fallen silent apart from the sounds of bombs and rockets.
She has been living in the hospital with her physician husband, Oleksandr, her two daughters (ages 2 and 5), and their babysitter since the second day of the war on Ukraine. She spoke to MedPage Today over Facebook late Saturday in Kyiv.
Currently, about one-third of the hospital staff are living in the hospital, she said.
The hospital wasn't meant to be an emergency department or to serve adults, but it has changed its "working plans" over the last few days. About 20% of the staff have been trained to manage emergencies and they are helping to train and organize everyone else, she said.
The first night was scary, Lysytsia said. She woke up to a "strange sound" and thought either she was crazy or she was having a nightmare. Then she scrolled Facebook and realized she wasn't alone.
"At first I was scared, really and honestly," she said. Then she began to calm down because what happened was expected, she said. "You cannot live in stress all the time."
And for anyone with children and patients to take care of, there's no choice but to be brave and do the work, Lysytsia added.
On Thursday, she worked in the hospital while her children stayed in a bomb shelter, but being separated was too nerve-wracking for her and her husband. So on Friday, they brought their children to the hospital.
The hospital tried to evacuate as many patients as possible to Lviv in western Ukraine and to Poland, but some patients can't be moved because they are on 24-hour infusions or are otherwise unstable.
Routine surgeries have been suspended. They also cannot perform organ transplants, because so many roads have been destroyed and because it's resource intensive, she said. They canceled three unrelated stem cell transfusions, because the donor marrow cannot be delivered from Germany and Poland. Transfusions from related donors who are near enough to the hospital can be performed, but even those will likely stop because it's risky and because of restrictions on movement around the city, she said.
The mother of one patient was frustrated because she thought her child's physician had abandoned them out of fear, Lysytsia said. But in reality the doctor lives near the airport in a region that had been attacked, and the bridge connecting her city with Kyiv was destroyed. "She physically cannot [come] do the work," although she is still trying, Lysytsia said.
All the entrances to the hospital are closed, but there is someone who can direct patients and doctors into the hospital in an emergency.
Asked what's changed over the last few days, Lysytsia said: "Everything." There was her life before the attacks started and then after; the only thing that hasn't changed is that patients still need care.
Typically there are a lot of activities and even celebrations for the kids in the hospital, but all of that has stopped. On Friday night, Lysytsia recalled, they couldn't sleep from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. because of all the noise from guns and bombs.
She and her husband take naps whenever they can. When they gather in the evenings, no one talks about work; everyone is reading the news and trying to find out whether their families and relatives are safe.
All of the patients had to be moved underground except for those in intensive care, including a patient who was hit in one of the attacks and had an operation on Friday. A nurse and one doctor stayed with him.
Over the weekend, the hospital helped at least one family wounded in the attacks, but one of the three young children died before arriving at the hospital, she said.
Two of the hospital's usual patients can't access their oncology treatments because they were at home when the attacks started and now can't reach Lysytsia's hospital or the one in Lviv. While staff can track how many people die in the hospital, they aren't sure how many people are dying for lack of treatment, and that's a problem, she said.
She did not want to say how many patients were currently in the hospital for safety reasons. A psychologist who typically works with oncology patients and their families is now helping hospital staff as well.
Lysytsia said her daughters have been brave, and while not always the best-behaved, they stay put when she tells them not to move, quiet down when she asks them to, and eat whatever she gives them.
Most importantly, while they are definitely afraid, they understand when Lysytsia tells them she has to leave to help other sick children. They tell her to do her work and come back to them as quickly as possible. On Saturday, Lysytsia's older daughter told her she wants to be a doctor too.
Lysytsia and her family will stay in the hospital for as long as they're needed.
"We realize that we need to be brave and stay 'til the end, because if we do not stay 'til the end, then we lose everything we have," she said.
Mike Heidenberg was forced to step away from his job at a New York college when he developed Covid-19 symptoms in the spring of 2020. Almost two years later, he still feels too sick to return to work.
Heidenberg, 48, is one of an untold number of Americans grappling with the mysterious effects of what has become known as long Covid. His concerns now go beyond his health.
“We can’t sustain living in this apartment we have called our home for 13 and a half years,” said Heidenberg, who had been working as a student adviser at Berkeley College in Westchester County.
Since the pandemic unemployment benefits ended last September, he has had to rely on donations from his local synagogue and a GoFundMe page to supplement his lost income. His employer-provided disability insurance cut him off in August 2020, which he said caused his blood pressure to spike into the 180s.
“It literally sent me to the emergency room,” he said.
Heidenberg’s problems are not unique.
An NBC News investigation into how the social safety net is responding to “long Covid” revealed critical gaps in the existing assistance programs.
Two taxpayer-funded programs are supposed to protect workers against lost income — unemployment insurance and long-term disability insurance — but neither is an option for most Americans with long Covid, who may be too sick to work but not ready to depart the workforce altogether.
“Long Covid cases fall into the huge middle ground between ‘I have a cold’ and ‘I have stage four pancreatic cancer,’” said Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. “That’s where we really have a huge gap in this country.”
Interviews with more than three dozen people across government agencies, medical fields and disability law practices revealed that large numbers of Americans are trying — and failing — to get financial assistance as they battle lingering Covid symptoms.
In recent months, medical experts and patients have been trying to sound the alarm that more needs to be done to help people with long Covid grappling with rising medical costs and lost income. Some are hoping that President Joe Biden will raise the issue in his State of the Union address Tuesday night.
But so far, efforts to prompt government action have largely gone unanswered.
“The system is gearing itself against individuals with long Covid,” said Dr. David Putrino, director of rehabilitation innovation for Mount Sinai Health System in New York. “And that makes them sicker and sicker over time … causing them so much stress and exertion as they’re trying to get care that it actually makes the condition worse.”
Uphill battle for benefits
An estimated seven to 23 million Americans have experienced “long Covid,” a catch-all term for roughly 200 symptoms ranging from memory issues to chest pain to dizziness upon standing.
Scientists still don’t know why some people get over their Covid symptoms in a few days while others go weeks, months and years. Experts say the wide range in estimates of people with long Covid is due to the lack of widespread testing earlier in the pandemic and shifting medical definitions across studies.
Absent a population-wide effort to track the long-term effects of Covid-19, it remains unclear how many American workers have been sidelined with long Covid — and which populations are most affected.
An NBC News survey, released through social media platforms, received over 1,700 responses from adults who reported experiencing long Covid symptoms — and nearly 1,000 people said they lacked resources to manage their condition.
Latesha Holloman said she has experienced chest pains, headaches, fatigue, dizziness and shortness of breath for over a year since contracting Covid-19.Courtesy Latesha Holloman
“We are a big family, but we lived on that stimulus check,” said Latesha Holloman, a 38-year-old mother of five daughters, ages 19, 16, 15, 13 and 12. “We don’t have any more savings.”
Holloman has been unable to work for over a year, since she contracted Covid-19 while working at the front desk of a health care company in Virginia. She has since applied for workers' compensation, private short-term disability insurance and unemployment insurance — and was denied at each turn, she said.
“It really shattered me, and I did fall into depression over it,” said Holloman. “And still, I’m hurt and angry. I just don’t understand why I cannot get compensated for losing income from getting Covid.”
Her disability insurance policy denied her claim, despite attestations that she struggled with talking, walking more than five minutes, or carrying more than five pounds. The Virginia Employment Commission, meanwhile, denied her unemployment claim because she “was not able to work due to medical reasons.”
“Unemployment says I can’t work. Disability says I can,” said Holloman. “Who is right?”
More than 1,000 people who responded to the NBC News surveyreported that long Covid had severely affected their ability to work or left them unable to work at all. Almost all survey respondents who applied for disability benefits — nearly 600 people — said they encountered difficulties in the process.
Many patients experience symptoms that doctors struggle to document, like fatigue and nervous system dysfunction. On the NBC News survey, over 850 people reported that a medical professional had questioned whether their symptoms were real.
Even at Mount Sinai’s Center for Post-Covid Care in New York City, Putrino said it is “luck of the draw” whether insurers accept his team’s clinical opinion that a patient needs time away from work.
“We try to be as objective as possible with all of our evaluation,” said Putrino, whose team has managed the care of over 1,500 patients with long Covid. “But often, our most strident proof can just be dismissed with a single email saying, ‘This isn’t enough.’”
Many who were denied benefits said they had no choice but to return to work in order to manage rising medical bills.
“If my employer knew the shape I am actually in, I wouldn’t have a job,” said a home health care worker in Pennsylvania, who told NBC News she has over $10,000 in medical debt and is trying to conceal her neurological issues from her employer while caring for patients with severe disabilities.
“I would have messed up their meds a billion times by now if I didn’t have so many backup checks,” she added.
A challenging system
For Americans with long-term disabilities, there is another path to benefits: Social Security, which pays out $1,360 per month on average to disabled workers.
But it is not an ideal fit for people with post-Covid symptoms: Two-thirds of all claims are typically denied, the process takes years and benefits only go to people who are expected to be disabled for at least 12 months to the degree that they cannot work any job at all.
“It is a very challenging system,” said Jason Turkish, president and managing partner at Nyman Turkish, a leading disability law firm. “They are trying to work through a process that is absolutely not designed to work well in this dynamic.”
Corey Sexton was hospitalized for two months with acute Covid-19.Courtesy Corey Sexton
Corey Sexton first applied in June 2020 after spending 57 days in the hospital with Covid, including three weeks on a ventilator, and receiving a tracheotomy. His claim has already been denied three times, most recently by a federal administrative law judge.
The judge was not persuaded by the opinions from Sexton’s doctors that he was unable to work, ruling that Sexton could manage sedentary unskilled work without any fast-paced requirements.
It was “a punch in the gut” for Sexton, who used to test guns as an employee for Glock, and now said he struggles to drive or shop for groceries without help. He has one more chance at the federal appeals level — but even if the claim is ultimately successful, his family will be waiting at least another year before payments.
“We had to take out credit cards to stay afloat, now they’re maxed out too,” Sexton, who lives in Georgia, said. “We’re thinking something has to kick in from the government so we can just live.”
Plea to lawmakers
In January, a patient-led organization called the Covid-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project sent an open letter to over 3,000 officials — including the White House, every member of Congress, and the governors of all 50 states.
The group received just three responses — from Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.; Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo.; and Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. — said Karyn Bishof, a former EMS worker in Florida who founded the group.
“All these people who are completely out of resources at this point, with no programs currently in the works, what are they supposed to do?” said Bishof, 32. “There’s nowhere for them to turn and nowhere for them to go until we get our lawmakers to act on our behalf.”
The letter from Bishof’s group suggested dozens of new policies — from a 9/11-style compensation fund to an additional question on the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey.
But their first goal, Bishof said, is for Biden to address long Covid in his State of the Union address.
“It’s probably the first time that half of the people watching will even hear the term ‘long Covid,’” Bishof said.
Last summer, the Biden administration issued guidance that long Covid could fit the definition of disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which gives employees a legal framework to negotiate workplace accommodations. But neither Congress nor the White House has proposed any new policies around long Covid, other than funding studies and data collection.
But for experts and officials the question of how to develop policy around long Covid is daunting. Some scientists believe long Covid — a term coined by patients — will grow to encompass a collection of post-viral illnesses that have long existed in society without proper documentation.
“It could require a Herculean investment to really assess the disability here,” said Dr. Anthony Komaroff, a clinical investigator at Harvard Medical School.
“The disability assessment system in the United States contains so few people relative to the potential burden of long Covid that it will never effectively happen unless something very innovative is done.”
In May 2020, Partridge’s symptoms escalated to tremors, numbness, brain fog, fatigue and heart palpitations that landed her in the ER with signs of a heart attack, she said.April Partridge
Partridge, 41, specializes in historical restorations, sculptures and mosaics. But for the past two years, she has been stuck in a cycle of long Covid in which even painting can trigger a wave of inflammation across her body that puts her down for days.
Her symptom flare-ups have landed her in the emergency room three times, and she now lives in a rented camper in the woods with her 5-year-old daughter, Coral. But each month, she needs to sell enough art to keep a roof over their heads.
“I’m setting myself back every single time, but I don’t have a choice because I have a kid I have to take care of,” said Partridge. “It’s like, what else can I do?”
Treatment with the interleukin-5 (IL-5) antagonist mepolizumab (Nucala) reduced the need to take oral corticosteroids by 75% in patients who had depended on the steroids to control symptoms of severe asthma, a researcher reported here.
Patients on a median 10 mg maintenance dose of oral corticosteroids at baseline reduced their intake to 2.5 mg by the end of the year-long study, reported Mark Liu, MD, of Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore.
And those on a median 5 mg maintenance dose at the start of the trial reduced their use to 0.4 mg by study end, Liu said in a video presentation at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology.
In the group taking high doses of steroids, 36% were able to be weaned off the drugs by the end of the study, he reported. In the patients who started with lower doses, 49% were able to discontinue steroid use, and among the entire group, 43% were able to get off steroids.
Overall, Liu said, treatment with mepolizumab reduced clinically significant annual exacerbations from a mean of 4.3 in the 12 months prior to the trial to 1.5 with mepolizumab use, and the reduction from baseline was seen across all patient groups, including those with high and low steroid use and those who were not taking steroids at baseline to control symptoms.
Liu suggested that despite the limitation of being a single-arm study, the "clinically important real-world findings indicate that patients with severe asthma treated with mepolizumab can reduce their oral corticosteroid use, potentially reducing the risk of side effects associated with their use, while improving their asthma control."
The co-moderator of the session at which the study was presented, William Anderson, MD, of Children's Hospital Colorado in Aurora, called the study important -- "especially for our adult patients who are on chronic steroids, because the side effects of chronic steroids are so profound and oftentimes can lead to equal if not worse effects than the underlying asthma itself."
"The ability to use a biologic agent to decrease the dose of an oral steroid for our patients is certainly extraordinarily promising," Anderson told MedPage Today. "Our ultimate goal is to get patients off oral steroids."
For the real-world, observational, prospective, international study, called REALITI-A, Liu and colleagues enrolled adults diagnosed with asthma who had been given a new prescription for mepolizumab and had available relevant medical records for at least 12 months prior to entering the trial. The decision to use mepolizumab was made at the discretion of the patient's physician and was given at the standard 100 mg subcutaneous dose.
"Patients with severe asthma often rely on oral corticosteroids to control their symptoms despite a well-recognized risk of complications even at low daily doses," Liu explained. The goal of the study, he said, was to determine what happened when these patients were treated with mepolizumab -- when stratified by steroid use -- in a real-world setting. The researchers enrolled patients from December 2016 through October 2019.
The researchers recruited 822 patients into the study. The average age was 54 years, and about 63% were women. Participants had been diagnosed with asthma for a mean of 19.7 years.
About 39% of the patients in the study were using oral steroids to control their asthma symptoms, with 139 patients taking less than 10 mg a day and 159 taking 10 mg or more.
Adverse events occurred in about 10% of the patients in the study, but serious adverse events occurred in less than 1%, Liu noted.
Disclosures
The study was sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline.
Liu disclosed relationships with GlaxoSmithKline, Boehringer Ingelheim, Gossamer Bio, and AstraZeneca.
Anderson disclosed relationships with GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, and Regeneron.
Nearly 300 complaints of healthcare organizations allegedly blocking access to patient data have been logged since major interoperability regulations went into effect last year.
A healthcare regulation went into effect last April that gives patients easier access to their digital health records through their smartphones. the regulation requires health IT vendors, providers and health information exchanges to enable patients to access and download their health records with third-party apps. Under the rule, providers can't inhibit the access, exchange or use of health information unless the data fall within eight exceptions.
Micky Tripathi, the national coordinator for health IT under the Biden administration, said the information blocking rules, along with other interoperability rules mandated by the 21st Century Cures Act, represent a "paradigm shift for the industry" by putting patients in control of their health data.
Healthcare experts believe the regulation could finally be a major step in achieving a meaningful level of data sharing far beyond what's been seen before in the healthcare sector.
According to data released by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), there have been 274 possible claims of information blocking submitted to the agency's Report Information Blocking Portal since April 5, 2021.
The bulk of the complaints accuses healthcare providers of alleged information blocking, as providers account for more than three-quarters of the complaints at 211.
"Though we cannot tell through simple triage whether a particular claim represents information blocking as defined in the regulations, some of the concerns described in the claims we have received appear on their face consistent with examples of practices likely to interfere with access, exchange, or use of EHI that we described in ONC’s Cures Act proposed and final rules," ONC executives Rachel Nelson and Cassie Weaver wrote in a blog post.
Healthcare providers have reported being charged what they assert are excessive fees to access electronic health information or to export that information to a new electronic health record system, and unnecessary delays in receiving electronic health information they have requested for their patients, Nelson and Weaver wrote.
Claimants representing the patient perspective have described being charged fees for electronic access to their health information, experiencing unnecessary delays in receiving access to their information, or both.
Of a total of 46 claims that seem likely to allege information blocking specifically by a health IT developer, 42 are against health IT developers who participate in the ONC Health IT Certification Program. Two claims are against health information networks/health information exchanges.
The claims of information blocking are only allegations and are investigated either by ONC or HHS' Office of the Inspector General, according to ONC officials in a blog post.
ONC can investigate claims that a health IT developer, such as an EHR company, has committed information blocking, due to the ONC Health IT Certification Program’s requirement that participants refrain from it. ONC also shares those claims with OIG.
ONC is responsible for defining the policies related to information blocking and establishing a complaint process, and the HHS' OIG is responsible for investigating complaints and assessing any necessary penalties on certified health IT developers or health information networks/exchanges, Tripathi wrote in Health Affairs this month.
The information blocking ban lacks teeth, for now.
In 2020, HHS' OIG released a proposed rule outlining civil monetary penalties related to information blocking. In the rule, OIG proposes a maximum fine of $1 million per violation. A final rule from OIG is expected in March to begin enforcement of the information blocking policies, Tripathi wrote.
Nelson and Weaver wrote that the data released Monday represents the first release of information blocking claims data. "We intend to evolve our reporting in the future as we get more data and public feedback. Our goal is to create transparency and help the industry prevent information blocking before it happens," they wrote in the blog post.
The ONC data also shows that 176 of the information blocking claims appear to come from patients (and/or their attorneys) and 32 on behalf of patients by third parties (such as patients’ parents or personal representatives); 32 appear to come from health care providers; and 20 appear to come from developers of health IT.
The claims suggest that ONC has had some success in fostering awareness of the agency's public reporting portal beyond the health IT community, because the claims are coming not only from health IT developers but from a variety of people—including patients and their representatives, and health care providers, Nelson and Weaver wrote.
Tenet Healthcare has officially called off plans to spin out Conifer, its revenue cycle business unit, due to insufficient market interest as well as the subsidiary's recent operational turnaround and growth potential.
Announced today in a press release and investor call, Tenet leadership said the board made the decision during recent months “following a thorough review” and “in consultation with independent legal and financial advisers and in consideration of the best interests of Tenet and its shareholders.”
“Conifer is primed with a robust pipeline and recent client wins with value that is not yet fully realized,” Saum Sutaria, M.D., CEO of Tenet, said in a statement. “When coupled with ongoing efficiency opportunities from offshoring and automation, we have a compelling runway for the business.”
Tenet began looking into a potential spinoff or other strategic decisions around the subsidiary in late 2017 and early 2018.
Executive Chairman Ron Rittenmeyer told investor Tuesday that the company had “many months of meetings” with an interested party shortly after this point but walked away from the talks when “it was clear their interest was really focused on a fire sale purchase, offering targets related to Tenet’s cash collection expectations that were simply not acceptable.”
After considering a number of other approaches, the company announced it would pursue a tax-free spinoff of the business in mid-2019. During this time, Tenet worked to strengthen the business’s operating margin, revamped its leadership and prepared the necessary regulatory forms and other requirements, Rittenmeyer said.
However, the company was thrown another curveball with the COVID-19 pandemic. Although Tenet announced in early 2021 that it would be pushing back the spinoff by at least a year, Conifer’s growth took a hit and the company worried that its business once again wasn’t being appropriately recognized by the market.
“Frankly, the market appeared to be less engaged in recognizing value driven by revenue cycle businesses” during the pandemic, Rittenmeyer said.
Despite the road bumps, Tenet’s board concluded that Conifer’s improving performance and upward growth trajectory earned it a lasting place with the for-profit healthcare giant.
According to today’s announcement, Conifer has improved its adjusted EBITDA margin by more than 1,000 basis points since 2017. The unit is also expected to deliver revenue growth “in the mid- to high-single digits with a strong margin and cash flow profile” throughout 2022, the company wrote.
“We believe that continuing to build on our progress with Conifer will provide greater returns for Tenet’s shareholders,” Rittenmeyer said in a statement.
Tenet’s broader business has also been going through a rework as ambulatory surgery subsidiary United Surgical Partners International grows and the core acute care hospital business consolidates within core markets.
In its earnings call last month, Rittenmeyer again affirmed that a more diversified approach—one which includes Conifer’s steady growth and cash flow generation—will be the way forward for what was a traditional hospital company.
