The Obama administration is relying on the consulting firm Accenture to lead the continued construction and maintenance of HealthCare.gov, but the giant company has a history of performance issues and questionable ethical practices. Last year, for instance, Accenture was hired by the state of North Carolina to streamline the computer program for its food stamp program. However, the program worked so poorly that it led to a major backlog of food stamp distribution. The faulty North Carolina program is just one example of the firm's problems laid out in a Washington Post report.
HealthCare.gov will be out of service for two and a half days beginning on Feb. 15 — the last day people can sign up to obtain coverage that begins on March 1. The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services announced in a blog post on Monday that the ObamaCare website would be down so the Social Security Administration can conduct its annual systems maintenance activities. The site will be out of order from 3 p.m. on Feb. 15 until 5 a.m. on Tuesday — a period that coincides with the long holiday weekend.
The Arkansas' experiment, known as the "private option" marks the first large-scale attempt to enroll Medicaid recipients into the same private health insurance plans that any consumer might buy in the health law's online insurance marketplace. That's different from how Medicaid typically works where enrollees must join state-operated programs or private managed care plans designed exclusively for the poor -- and which pay doctors less, sometimes a lot less. As a result, private option enrollees like Fant will have access to a larger network of doctors and hospitals than is usually available through Medicaid.
Despite efforts by the Obama administration to ease shortages of critical drugs, shortfalls have persisted, forcing doctors to resort to rationing in some cases or to scramble for alternatives, a government watchdog agency said on Monday. The number of annual drug shortages — both new and continuing ones — nearly tripled from 2007 to 2012. In recent years, drug shortages have become an all but permanent part of the American medical landscape. The most common ones are for generic versions of sterile injectable drugs, partly because factories that make them are aging and prone to quality problems, causing temporary closings of production lines or even entire factories.
When I first was introduced to the infosec subculture in the1990s, there seemed to be very few of us in healthcare provider organizations with official security roles. And we were mostly "stuckees" who just fell into the job. (You know, someone in charge pointed at you and said, "You're now our security person.") You'd think patient privacy, and, thus, security, would be embraced, but it wasn't so. Doctors and nurses swore they already were privacy sensitive. And, after all, we weren't banks holding money to be stolen… Who'd want to steal our databases with a few million boring medical records?
A Winston-Salem hospital apologized Monday after improper sterilization exposed nearly 20 patients to a rare neurological disease. Novant Health Forsyth Medical Center President Jeff Lindsay told a news conference that 18 patients may have been exposed to Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. A neurosurgical procedure was done on Jan. 18 on a patient who was later confirmed to have the disease, a degenerative fatal brain disorder. The other 18 patients, all neurosurgical patients, were exposed to surgical equipment that had been cleaned using a typical sterilization procedures, but not the enhanced sterilization procedures used for Creutzfeldt-Jakob.