FYI, that whole wedgie thing is actually brutal to read about, and it led to some extremely serious injuries for…
Morning Headlines 2/17/20
Feds probing how personal Medicare info gets to marketers
HHS OIG finds that CMS’s lack of oversight of its Medicare Part D eligibility database has allowed companies to submit millions of inquiries to harvest the personal health information of Medicare beneficiaries, potentially for use in telemarketing scams.
Patient records aggregator Innovaccer raises $70 million in a Series C funding round, increasing its total to $120 million.
Flywire Acquires Simplee to Transform Healthcare Payments Experience
Payments company Flywire acquires healthcare payments platform vendor Simplee.
Wait, wait, wait. I just read the OIG Report on the Medicare Part D eligibility database. The HHS OIG found that:
-They provided open API access to a medical records database
-98% of API transactions issued to the database were unrelated to patient care
-Those API transactions were used to extract personal information, which was then joined to other consumer personal identification databases used for marketing
-The collective databases were used to target patients for scams
-The HHS OIG is now recommending “data blocking” as a solution (“ensure that only pharmacies and other authorized entities submit E1 transactions”)
But forget that, bring on the proposed interoperability rule baby! Full steam ahead! HHS is basically acting as the caricature of a bad middle manager. Micromanaging EHR vendors despite the fact that they themselves have not been successful in performing the mandated task (Medicare Part D database, DoD project, etc); no clear line between why they’re asking you to do something and the task itself; and ignoring both internal evidence (their own OIG) and external evidence (public comments) that contradicts their stated goal.
Many people have worked under management like that, and it very rarely succeeds.