The good news is no data was taken. The bad news is that a HealthCare.gov server was hacked because of major lapses in security — calling into question the state of the hundreds of other servers that comprise the website. The New York Times reported the incident, which involved malware installed on a test server. That malware was intended to launch denial-of-service attacks that bombard other websites with traffic and knock them offline. Most security experts say such attacks are a nuisance but don't bring a huge amount of risk in terms of data theft. But how did it happen? The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services pointed to lapses in security, from connecting the test server to the Internet — which was never intended — to failing to change the original password assigned by the hardware manufacturer.
A contract between Stanford Hospital & Clinics and giant health plan Anthem Blue Cross expired on midnight Sunday, affecting about 10,000 enrollees. Mark Morgan, Anthem's president, sent a Sept. 5 letter to Amir Dan Rubin, president and CEO at what's now known as Stanford Health Care, calling it "unfortunate that (Stanford) has decided to terminate" the contract. Anthem says Stanford Health Care sent a letter in late February that terminated the contract in 180 days. But officials at Stanford say the three-year contract was scheduled to terminate at 11:59 p.m. Sunday.
The idea of narrow networks — health insurance plans that limit enrollees to a small set of doctors — is not a concept that's especially popular with consumers. Who wants a health insurance plan, after all, that tells you your favorite doctor is one it won't cover? Narrow networks are common on Obamacare's new exchanges, as health insurers try to hold down premium prices by contracting with fewer doctors. McKinsey and Co. estimates that more than a third of the plans sold on the new marketplaces left out 70 percent of the region's large hospitals. This unsurprisingly led to a barrage of negative headlines about insurers leaving well-known hospitals out of network.
An outbreak of a respiratory illness has hospitals in Hannibal, Missouri, and Quincy, Illinois, restricting visitors. Hannibal Regional Hospital is asking children 16 and younger to refrain from visiting patients. The Hannibal Courier Post reports that the hospital also is discouraging visits from people suffering from fevers, runny noses, sneezes, coughs, mouth blisters, aches and rashes. At Blessing Hospital in Quincy, children under the age of 12 are restricted from visiting hospital patients. Blessing reported the outbreak hit hard over the Labor Day holiday weekend, with more than 70 children going to the Blessing Emergency Center with breathing difficulties.
Harvard University is receiving the biggest gift in its history — $350 million to the School of Public Health to help fight global health threats, university officials plan to announce Monday. The donation comes from the Morningside Foundation, the family charity of Hong Kong billionaire Gerald Chan. It will substantially bolster the endowment of one of the university's lesser-funded schools. "Let us hope this will be a signal to the world about how important public health is," Harvard University president Drew Faust said in an interview. The public health field in general "has been underresourced," she said, as evidenced by the world's slow response to the Ebola outbreak, which has become a scourge in western Africa.
Doctors complain that they waste an average of 48 minutes a day, or four hours a week, when they record their patients' health information into digital records, a new study shows. The results were collected in a small survey, whose findings were put into a letter that was published Monday in the online edition of JAMA Internal Medicine. A draft of the letter was released Monday to a group of health care reporters at the National Library of Medicine. Dr. Clement McDonald, lead author of the study and director of the NLM Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, presented the letter, "The Use of Internist's Free Time by Ambulatory Care Electronic Medical Record Systems."