Morning Headlines 2/20/23

Morning Headlines 2/20/23

February 19, 2023 Headlines No Comments Reported HIPAA complaints and breaches shot up from 2017 to 2021: HHS
HHS OCR reports that it does not have the financial resources it needs to investigate mounting HIPAA breaches and complaints, both of which increased between 2017 and 2021.
Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare resumes normal operations, but questions loom
Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare (FL) announces that it has fully restored its computer systems and services 13 days after an unspecified security incident forced it to downtime procedures.
Lightbeam Health Solutions Is Relocating Its HQ from Las Colinas to Cypress Waters in Coppell
Population health management company Lightbeam Health Solutions…

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Bonus Features – February 19, 2023 – 80% of orgs collect SDOH data but struggle to make use of it, 2 in 3 cybersecurity pros say their orgs underestimate threats, and more

Bonus Features – February 19, 2023 – 80% of orgs collect SDOH data but struggle to make use of it, 2 in 3 cybersecurity pros say their orgs underestimate threats, and more

Welcome to the weekly edition of Healthcare IT Today Bonus Features. This article will be a weekly roundup of interesting stories, product announcements, new hires, partnerships, research studies, awards, sales, and more. Because there’s so much happening out there in healthcare IT we aren’t able to cover in our full articles, we still want to make sure you’re informed of all the latest news, announcements, and stories happening to help you better do your job.
Surveys
A survey of 2,600 AHIMA members found that about 80% of healthcare organizations are collecting social determinants of health data. The bad news: Organizations face multiple challenges…

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Weekly Roundup – February 18, 2023

Weekly Roundup – February 18, 2023

Welcome to our Healthcare IT Today Weekly Roundup. Each week, we’ll be providing a look back at the articles we posted and why they’re important to the healthcare IT community. We hope this gives you a chance to catch up on anything you may have missed during the week.
6 Organizations Approved As Initial QHINs Under TEFCA. CommonWell, eHealth Exchange, Epic, Health Gorilla, Kno2, and KONZA were named the inaugural QHINs. The announcement wasn’t much of a surprise, but John said it will be interesting to see which technology vendors ultimately get behind which QHINs. Read more…
Exploring LG’s Partnership With Amwell. LG…

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PBMs Come Under Fire During Senate Hearing

PBMs Come Under Fire During Senate Hearing

Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) took a hit from lawmakers during a Thursday hearing held by the Senate Commerce Committee, with some questioning why the drug middlemen are even necessary.
“The way I see the situation on PBMs, I don’t know why the hell they even exist,” said Sen. Jon Tester, D-Montana. “They were set up with all the right reasons … But what I see them doing in my state, I don’t think the consumer gets much benefit and they’re shutting down small businesses on main street right and left and those are called our local neighborhood pharmacies.” The hearing discussed how…

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Exclusive Look at HandX Robotic-Assisted Surgical Device from Human Xtensions

Exclusive Look at HandX Robotic-Assisted Surgical Device from Human Xtensions

Surgical robotics is dominated by various versions of the da Vinci system from Intuitive Surgical, a competent but expensive tool that’s become a standard in modern advanced hospitals. It took Intuitive about 30 years to achieve this status, but there are systems from J&J, Medtronic, CMR Surgical, and others that are chipping away at the company’s dominance. All of these systems operate under the “master-slave” concept, which involves a surgeon sitting behind a console, away from the patient, who manipulates the mechanical arms of the robot via some kind of joystick-like device. Thanks to kind support from Biomed Israel, the leading…

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Health benefits platform Collective Health announces layoffs

Health benefits platform Collective Health announces layoffs

Collective Health, a health benefits management platform, has laid off 54 employees as it arranges its workforce to better align with customer needs. The company’s CEO, Ali Diab, announced the layoffs on LinkedIn, saying the employees were being let go due to a “workforce reduction,” while urging companies that may encounter those employees during the hiring process to provide them with “strong consideration.”
Collective Health acts as a third-party health benefits administrator, bringing companies’ various benefits into one platform to let employers manage their offerings while assisting employees with navigating their healthcare.
“We can confirm that as part of a restructuring of our workforce,…

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Retrieving Billions in Overpayments by CMS

Retrieving Billions in Overpayments by CMS

Amid swirling accusations that Medicare Advantage Organizations (MAOs) are overbilling the U.S. government and calls for better oversight, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced in early February that it would investigate overbilling by those plans. They expect to recoup 4.7 billion dollars through this program.
This article focuses on the relatively young technologies that enable CMS to uncover overbillings, whether they be errors or fraud. The article is based on an interview with Kel Pults, chief clinical officer and vice president of MediQuant. A future article will explain how Medicare Advantage plans are trying to improving data collection and reporting,…

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Personalized CAR-T Cell Therapy

Personalized CAR-T Cell Therapy

Researchers at the Harvard Wyss Institute and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have developed a new method to prepare chimeric antigen receptor-T cells (CAR-T cells) for leukemia patients that could result in more effective treatment. CAR-T cells start life as T cells that are isolated from cancer patients, are stimulated and primed to recognize and attack cancer cells, expanded in number, and then reintroduced to the cancer patient with the goal that the cells will destroy their cancer. However, the technique works better in certain patients, and the researchers behind this latest technique have realized that T-cells from cancer patients do […]…

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What the metaverse and virtual reality can contribute to healthcare

What the metaverse and virtual reality can contribute to healthcare

The so-called metaverse and virtual reality are up-and-coming technologies that could offer healthcare quite a bit.Medical practitioners can test out the effectiveness of new surgical methods in the metaverse before attempting on real patients. And as an extension of telehealth, medical professionals can use virtual reality to access patients and examine them virtually.
What exactly is the metaverse? How does virtual reality work? What can they contribute to healthcare? And where will these technologies offer innovations in the years to come?
To get answers to these questions, we sat down with Pari Natarajan, CEO of Zinnov, a global management and consulting firm focusing…

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