Weekender 6/19/20

Weekly News Recap

• Health Care Service Corporation, the country’s fifth-largest insurer, will create a Payer Platform to connect its health plans to Epic-using health systems.
• Epic cancels UGM 2020.
• Proteus Digital Health, once valued at $1.5 billion, files Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
• Walmart acquires the technology assets of online pharmacy CareZone for a rumored $200 million.
• Surgisphere, the tiny company whose questionably sourced aggregated EHR data was responsible for two major research article retractions, appears to have shut down.
• Milliman acquires Wisconsin-based employee health monitoring technology vendor Healthio.

Best Reader Comments

I can’t help but wonder how this will affect minor telephone calls with doctors. In the past, I would occasionally call a doctor on the phone to check in on a test result or ask about a medicine and so on. These were relatively quick, focused calls for which there was no charge. But going forward, if telehealth becomes an accepted modality for paid services, what’s to stop a doctor from billing me for each of those calls? (Ben)

If you want providers to do something, you have to pay for it. I’ve got some nice cushy corporate insurance, so I can get my PCP to throw in a couple of freebie phone calls after he’s price gouged me on a few visits. If I had an ACA exchange plan, I doubt I’d get the same level of customer service. I’d rather the billing for telehealth and chat services gets formalized so that the people on government or skimpy plans can push for and get it. Otherwise it’s just going to be a perk for good employer plans, which means it won’t affect anything. (IANAL)

I am appreciative that CMS has relaxed some of the constraints for telehealth services billing during the pandemic but those rules were inane restrictions to begin with. Why should a patient ever have been precluded from getting telehealth at home, simply because they don’t live in a designated rural area? (ValueBasedSkeptic)

As to the hype around value-based payments, we’ve lived through this before with different names and slightly different variants. Improving quality sounds great, but we still can’t define or measure quality well, even for very clear-cut conditions. We’ve spent untold money and efforts on quality measures with lots of content from CMS, NQF and others. Yet for some specialties, there are few if any viable measures. Whether it’s framed as improving population health or some other positive sounding initiative, the main goal has always been shifting costs onto the backs of providers. (ValueBasedSkeptic)

Watercooler Talk Tidbits

Readers funded the Donors Choose teacher grant request of Ms. H in North Carolina, who asked for game buzzers and wobble cushions for her fifth-grade ADHD students. She reported in February, “My students come in every day begging to use the wobble cushions, as well as wanting to know if we will be playing a game with the buzzers. We will continue using these resources daily in our classroom until the end of the school year. I know my future students will be just as excited next year using the wobble cushions and game buzzers.”

Federal authorities arrest a Chinese citizen at LAX as he attempts to board a flight to China, charging him with obtaining a UCSF post-doctoral fellowship position so he could record lab layout details that could be replicated in China. The man, who turned out to be a major in the People’s Liberation Army, admitted that he had been stealing information in his year of employment there. His laptop contained UCSF study information and he had wiped his WeChat phone messages right before arriving at the airport. He is charged so far only with visa fraud.

Four ICU nurses sue Landmark Hospital (GA), claiming that the hospital ordered them to perform COVID-19 test swabbing incorrectly to ensure that the tests would come back negative.

NASA’s next Mars rover, scheduled for launch on July 20, will bear a plate that honors those who are on the COVID-19 front lines.

In Case You Missed It

• News 6/19/20
• EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 6/18/20
• News 6/17/20
• Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 6/15/20
• HIStalk Interviews Gadi Lachman, CEO, TriNetX
• Monday Morning Update 6/15/20

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