Snooping on celebrities has been a bane for health systems around the country for years. The proliferation of electronic medical records systems has made it easier to track and punish those who peek in records they have no legitimate reason to access. Below is a partial list of high-profile breaches and the consequences that accompanied them, compiled from news reports. October 2007: Palisades Medical Center in New Jersey suspended 27 workers without pay for a month for looking at the medical records of actor George Clooney, who had been treated there the prior month after a motorcycle accident.
The proposed Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' (CMS) plan for coverage of the Watchman left atrial appendage (LAA) closure device shouldn't require a registry control arm and should adjust performance and patient selection criteria, a trio of professional societies argued.
A Senate investigation of drug-price spikes at four companies kicked off Wednesday with specialists from all corners of the health-care system testifying that they're powerless to manage the out-of-control prescription costs. The hearing launches the Special Committee on Aging's investigation into the soaring prices of old drugs, including the recent overnight price hike of Daraprim from $18 to $750. Doctors and policy experts offered a slew of proposed policy solutions, such as expediting applications for generic drugs to increase competition and requiring companies to reveal how much drugs really cost.
More than 1 million new customers have signed up for insurance on the federal insurance exchange Healthcare.gov and the site is developing near-deadline momentum, federal officials said Wednesday. Six days before the Dec. 15 deadline for coverage that starts Jan. 1, acting Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Andrew Slavitt said there has been a "surge of interest" is signing up for insurance. By the end of last week, 2.8 million people had chosen plans on Healthcare.gov, which serves 38 states that didn't set up their own insurance exchanges. That includes the 1 million new enrollees and an additional 1.8 million who renewed their policies.
Under the federal law known as HIPAA, it's illegal for health care providers to share patients' treatment information without their permission. The Office for Civil Rights, the arm of the Department of Health and Human Services responsible for enforcing the law, receives more than 30,000 reports about privacy violations each year. The bulk of the government's enforcement — and the public's attention — has focused on a small number of splashy cases in which hackers or thieves have accessed the health data of large groups of people. But the damage done in these mass breaches has been mostly hypothetical, with much information exposed, but little exploited.
More states improved than worsened over time on most measures examined in new health rankings out Wednesday — the first since the Affordable Care Act's coverage expansions took effect. The Commonwealth Fund Scorecard on State Health System Performance looks at access to medical care, prevention and treatment of disease, avoidable hospital use and cost, healthy lives and health equity. Some of the 42 indicators on the scorecard are numbers of insured adults, people 50 and older who got recommended screenings, adults who went without care because of cost, breast cancer deaths and infant mortality.