Healthcare IT systems are ripe for security breaches. Medical records are especially data-rich, and thus are coveted in the circles within which stolen information is circulated. As a point of comparison, while the going rate for an illegally obtained credit card number is a few dollars, a stolen medical record can frequently be sold for upwards of $50. There is incentive for attacks on health records systems, and they happen frequently. In 2013, 43.8% of security breaches occurred in healthcare, according to the Identity Theft Resource center. Considering that compromised health data can lead to not only identity theft, but also to misdiagnosis as a result of inaccurate medical records, the stakes are high.
Raising fresh questions about healthcare consolidation, a new study shows hospital ownership of physician groups in California led to 10% to 20% higher costs overall. The UC Berkeley research, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., illustrates the financial risks for employers, consumers and taxpayers as hospital systems nationwide acquire more physician practices. "I think this consolidation wave is virtually unstoppable," said James Robinson, the study's lead author and a UC Berkeley professor of health economics. "Left to itself, it will increase the cost of healthcare."
To clamp down on health care costs, a growing number of employers and insurers are putting limits on how much they'll pay for certain medical services such as knee replacements, lab tests and complex imaging. A recent study found that savings from such moves may be modest, however, and some analysts question whether "reference pricing," as it's called, is good for consumers. The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), which administers the health insurance benefits for 1.4 million state workers, retirees and their families, has one of the more established reference pricing systems.
The Dallas hospital that has treated three Ebola patients will no longer admit anyone who has been infected with the disease, Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced Tuesday. Texas health officials are creating a pair of new Ebola treatment centers to handle any additional cases. Neither of those facilities are at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, which has been heavily criticized for its flawed care of the country's first Ebola patient. "In the event of another diagnosis, [these facilities] will allow us to act quickly to limit the virus's reach and give patients the care they need in an environment where healthcare workers are specially trained and equipped to deal with the unique requirements of this disease," Perry said Tuesday.
While Ebola stokes public anxiety, more than one in six hospitals — including some top medical centers — are having trouble stamping out less exotic but sometimes deadly infections, federal records show. Nationally, about one in every 25 hospitalized patients gets an infection, and 75,000 people die each year from them—more than from car crashes and gun shots combined. A Kaiser Health News analysis found 695 hospitals with higher than expected rates for at least one of the six types of infections tracked by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In the United States, it's difficult -- if not impossible -- to find out the price of health-care services in advance, making it hard to get the best deal. Massachusetts has now taken the effort of making prices publicly available further than any other state. Starting this month as part of its 2012 law that caps health-care prices and establishes new oversight agencies in an attempt to drive down costs, all private insurers in the state had to begin posting the most accurate price estimates possible for an array of procedures on their websites.