Giving a patient medications in the ER, having them pop positive on a test, and then withholding further medications because…
News 6/17/22
Top News
An investigative article finds that the websites of 33 of Newsweek’s top 100 US hospitals send Facebook the IP address of people who schedule an appointment online. The Meta Pixel tracker also sends Facebook the doctor’s name and the search term that the user entered to find them.
The hospitals include Hopkins, UCLA, New York Presbyterian, Northwestern, and Duke.
Reporters also found that at least seven health systems have installed Meta Pixel on their patient portals, including Community Health Network, Edward-Elmhurst Health, and Novant Health.
The hospitals may have violated HIPAA in sharing personally identifiable health information with third parties without the consent of patients.
Reader Comments
From Cedar: “Re: pre-Oracle attempts to develop a national EHR. I recall one entrepreneur in the 2000s who had no healthcare experience who announced he was developing a national EHR. I believe it was Jim Clark of Netscape. Are you aware of any other famous Silicon Valley heads who made a big splash and then went nowhere?” Jim Clark’s Healtheon was certainly all over healthcare, trading on his success with Netscape to eventually merge with WebMD. Intel co-founder Andy Grove also hatched grand healthcare technology plans in the mid-aughts that went nowhere. Google and Microsoft had their own arrogance-fueled failures with personal health records. Sun Microsystems made some national noise in the mid-2000s, then sold out to Oracle in 2010. IBM had a bunch of now-forgotten projects. I’ll invite readers to help me recall other big tech companies that showed misplaced confidence in planning to show us healthcare folks how it’s done before slinking away shortly thereafter with the newfound knowledge that you can’t fix a dysfunctional, profit-obsessed healthcare system with technology.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
People
CloudWave promotes Chris Mellyn to VP of marketing.
Aetna/CVS Health promotes Ron Wampler to executive director of interoperability.
Melissa Bell (Intelligent Medical Objects) joins TigerConnect as president.
Cone Health hires Jeetu Nanda, MD, MS, MBA (Cerner) as CMIO.
David Kates, MBA, MSEE (Manifest MedEx) joins Unified Patient Network as CTO.
Opala hires Ken Chandler (Premera Blue Cross) as CEO.
Krista Hawk (HealthPay24) joins Doctivity Health as VP of sales and business development.
Announcements and Implementations
Providence and Microsoft launch a nine-month clinical innovation fellowship.
Walgreens launches a clinical trial business that includes patient recruitment, a decentralized clinical trial platform, and real-world evidence.
Other
The Washington Post calls out Phreesia for using the patient information it collects from its patient check-in app collects to target drug company ads.
A Kaiser Health News investigation finds that 41% of US adults are saddled with healthcare-related debt, much of it hidden in the form of credit card balances, family loans, or provider payment plans. An expert says that debt is a main product of a health system that is “almost perfectly designed to create debt.” One in seven people who have medical debt say they can’t receive further care because of their unpaid bills. The authors note that the Affordable Care Act caps out-pocket costs, but few Americans can afford the $8,700 annual maximum and high-deductible plans require paying thousands of dollars before coverage even begins.
Sponsor Updates
- EClinicalWorks announces its continued partnership with Witham Health Services (IN) to further improve patient communications and achieve overall operational efficiency in more than 30 locations.
- Diameter Health publishes a new white paper, “Healthcare ROI: How Health Plans Use Diameter Health’s Automated, Scalable Technology to Maximize Value from Clinical Data Investments and Avoid Significant Operational Cost.”
- Pivot Point Consulting promotes Molly Kalinowski to director of managed services application support.
- AGS Health opens an office in Jaipur, India.
- Experian Health releases a new infographic, “The Digital Healthcare Gap: Streamlining the Patient Journey.”
- Research from Juniper Networks finds AI adoption has expanded tenfold across enterprises while governance lags.
Blog Posts
- Why Health Plans Need Automation to Get ROI from Clinical Data (Diameter Health)
- Engaging Inactive Patients Through Personalized Outreach (Get Well)
- 7 Benefits Digital Health Education Brings to Care Management (Healthwise)
- Why your Zero Trust strategy needs a third-party privileged access component (Imprivata)
- EHR Report Distribution: 3 workflow basics for hospital efficiency (Interbit Data)
- Disrupting Healthcare Through Innovation (InterSystems)
- How clinical documentation impacts revenue cycle management (Intelligent Medical Objects)
- How Digital Support Groups Bridge the Patient-Provider Divide (Medhost)
- Physical Therapy Superbill vs. Courtesy Billing: Difference & Uses (MWTherapy)
- Transparency vs Status Quo: Why Point-of-Care Patient Financial Responsibility Calculations Up Your Star Rating (Myndshft)
- Looking for Ways to Keep Patients Enrolled and Engaged in Skin and Wound Clinical Trials? Do This … Not That (Net Health)
- NeuroFlow’s Journey Gallery Improves Access to Self-Guided Behavioral Health Support (NeuroFlow)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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You can’t fix any healthcare system with technology. The technology is the easy part. People and process are the biggest part of any fix and generally come before technology. However, organizations buy technology thinking it is a solution and it isn’t.
It is disgusting that HCO’s send our data to Facebook. If we wanted that to happen we would give it to them (minus the PHI) ourselves. This has got to stop. Our HCO is on that list and we all very upset.
Saw the article below come out a week ago and thought I would share. I think this includes a $10K deductible, but not 100%. Not health insurance any longer, just catastrophic health coverage. And when did a healthy family with kids pay $10K a year on colds, immunizations, physicals, etc.? That’s just a huge pay raise for the providers. My doc of 17 years sent me a $300 office visit bill when it was $100 last year. It’s just hard to understand.
In 2022, the cost of healthcare for a hypothetical American family of four covered by an average employer-sponsored preferred provider organization (PPO) plan is $30,260, according to the Milliman Medical Index (MMI).1,2
https://www.milliman.com/en/insight/2022-Milliman-Medical-Index?utm_source=cerkl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter-06012022&cerkl_id=15835898&cerkl_ue=ynTIGRddm00hX67uZkAw48qK21DfA5L5cyUlaY2lPEh%2FrfjDCXKe8iJJG0wYqqQZ
Greedy maybe?
Re: the new poll about looking at email on the weekends. I used to but don’t any longer. I’ve asked my employees to not answer emails on the weekends as well. I used to routinely work 70 hours/week, driven by my email. Such is the life of a small business owner with clients who work 7 days a week. But once I set the expectation with my clients that I’m answering emails during my work week hours, I didn’t get any pushback at all. I’ve gotten so far removed from that grind that I don’t even look at email on my phone, unless I’m out of the office and I’m expecting something important. I cannot tell you the level of stress I dropped when I stopped being driven by Outlook. And because of that, I’ve not enforced a ‘no emails after work hours’ policy, but I encourage it, and know that it gives my team a level of relief that they are not expected to reply outside of work hours. I also have a statement in my email signature that if you need a reply in less than 2 business days, please copy my support team email so they can ping me. One thing that helped me ignore email outside of work hours is to turn off all the alerts when emails arrive. No pop ups, no pings, nothing making me look.
Av even better way to avoid after hours email is just to turn off sync after hours
This is going in my quote library for future use: “you can’t fix a dysfunctional, profit-obsessed healthcare system with technology.”
Thanks Mr H