Category: Health Information Technology

Tackling Medicaid In Massachusetts

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

This new post by Jeffrey Sánchez appears on the Health Affairs Blog as part of a series stemming from the Third Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Friday, January 30, 2015.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) provides a number of tools to address longstanding problems in our fragmented health care system. At the national level, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) are redefining Medicare through initiatives that promote payment and delivery reform, such as Shared Savings and Value-Based Purchasing. States are also seeking their own opportunities to move away from inefficient systems that reward volume over quality. In particular, state Medicaid programs have the potential to play a major role in these efforts.

Given the number of individuals Medicaid covers, it has the biggest potential impact in improving health care. Medicaid covers more than 1 in 5 Americans, funding more than 16 percent of total personal health spending in the United States. With ACA Medicaid expansion, enrollment increased in 2014 by 8.3 percent and led to an increased overall Medicaid spending growth of 10.2 percent. Total Medicaid spending growth in 2015 is expected to be 14.3 percent with a 13.2 percent enrollment growth. This is not an insignificant portion of both state and federal health care dollars. Thoughtful and concerted reforms to Medicaid have the potential to reduce spending and improve care quality. […]

Read the full article here.

Exploring The Significant State-To-State Variation In Marketplace Enrollment

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

This new post by the Petrie-Flom Center’s Academic Fellow Matthew J. B. Lawrence appears on the Health Affairs Blog, as part of a series stemming from the Third Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Friday, January 30, 2015.

What role did geography, advertising, community, Navigators, and the controversy surrounding the Affordable Care Act (ACA) play in consumers’ decisions whether to purchase health insurance in the individual marketplaces? The percentage of potential exchange marketplace enrollees who actually made use of the marketplace to purchase insurance varied widely from state to state for 2014 and 2015.

As of February 22, 2015, for example, there were eight states with enrollment at 50 percent or greater and eight states with enrollment at 25 percent or lower. (Per the Kaiser Family Foundation, the top eight were Vermont, Florida, Maine, DC, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and North Carolina. The bottom eight were Colorado, Ohio, Alaska, Hawaii, North Dakota, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Iowa).

It would be an interesting and challenging task to explain this variation empirically. Generating reliable statistical inferences from inter-state comparisons is notoriously difficult, and the variables at play here range from the easily measured (percent of population eligible for subsidies, navigator grant amounts, number of participating insurers, premiums) to the not-so-easily measured (enthusiasm for Obamacare, efficacy of state or federal outreach efforts, geography, education, availability and usefulness of charity care and emergency Medicaid, functionality of state exchange website, population health, availability of health services). […]

Read the full post here.

Should Health Lawyers Pay Attention To The Administration’s Privacy Bill?

Nicolas P. Terry Leave a comment

By Nicolas Terry

Cross Posted from Health Affairs Blog

Health care lawyers justifiably ignored the 2012 Obama administration consumer privacy framework because it expressly and broadly exempted entities subject to HIPAA, stating “To avoid creating duplicative regulatory burdens, the Administration supports exempting companies from consumer data privacy legislation to the extent that their activities are subject to existing Federal data privacy laws.”

In contrast, the administration’s 2015 draft bill, the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights Act, though based on that framework, substantially affects health care entities, including those subject to HIPAA, and so demands more attention in the health law community.

The “HIPAA clause” in the draft bill is subtly different (and noticeably narrower than its preemption of state law clause): “If a covered entity is subject to a provision of this Act and a comparable provision of a Federal privacy or security law [the list includes HIPAA] such provision of this Act shall not apply to such person to the extent that such provision of Federal privacy or security law applies to such person.” Read More

Going for gold: behavioral science reveals new biases in ACA exchange shopping

laurenataylor Leave a comment

A new New England Journal of Medicine commentary by Peter A. Ubel, M.D., David A. Comerford, Ph.D., and Eric Johnson, Ph.D. highlights significant flaws in the way information is presented to insurance shoppers on state and federal exchange websites. The authors present original survey data to support the argument that subtle aspects of current website designs inappropriately bias decision making. The authors make their case most strongly in an analysis of the well-known gold, silver and bronze labels:

Consider the decision to lump health plans into categories with names such as bronze (for low monthly premiums and high out-of-pocket costs) and gold (for higher monthly premiums and lower out-of-pocket costs). These labels could have unintended effects on people’s attitudes toward which plans are best. After all, gold, silver, and bronze convey best, second best, and third best through association with sporting events, but the best plan for one enrollee will be different from the best plan for another.

To test whether such associations might influence people’s perceptions of insurance plans, two of us recruited a convenience sample of participants from public buses in Durham, North Carolina, and asked them which category of plans they would look at first if they were shopping for health insurance. To half the people, we described the gold plans as having higher monthly premiums and lower out-of-pocket costs — the language used by many exchanges. For the other half, we switched the gold and bronze plans, describing the gold plans as having lower monthly premiums and higher out-of-pocket costs.

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A Chief Privacy Officer’s Take on the Chanko Case

laurenataylor 2 Comments

Earlier this month, Charles Ornstein explored a New York City family’s charge that their privacy was violated by a local hospital and a reality television show in ProPublica. More specifically, he details how the death of one Mr. Mark Chanko was filmed at NY Presbyterian Hospital without the family’s consent, and then nationally aired on ABC’s NY MED over a year later. Mr. Chanko’s face was blurred for viewers but he remained recognizable to family and friends who watched the show. Since the broadcast, the family has pursued legal action through several New York courts with little success thus far.

The piece has already been commented upon by several smart people, most recently Kay Lazar of the Boston Globe. Just one day after Ornstein’s piece went to press, the Dean of Harvard Medical School Jeffrey Flier (@jflier) tweeted “How could this be allowed to happen?” only to be informed by the Chair of Surgery at Boston Medical Center, Gerard Doherty, (@GerardDoherty4) that three Harvard-affiliated hospitals are in fact currently hosting camera crews for a similar series. The ensuing conversation reminded me just how limited a platform Twitter is for tricky conversations about health care law and ethics. So I did what any self-respecting millennial would do – I went home for the holidays and asked my mom to help me understand what the internet couldn’t.

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Information Blocking and Interoperability

Nicolas P. Terry Leave a comment

By Nicolas Terry

The “Cromnibus” spending bill signed by the President on December 16 rightly upset Senator Warren and not just for providing luxury cars to a feckless Congress. However, in general the bill ignored healthcare. There was no new money for those ACA “villains” CMS and IRS and only a little more for NIH (resulting in net reductions all around given inflation). Of course constituencies have to be pandered to, so there was a symbolic $10 million cut from the moribund IPAB. Meanwhile, the CDC did well, HRSA picked up a few telemedicine dollars, but ONC didn’t get everything it wanted. However, look closer and it seems that during the convoluted legislative process someone threw a meaty wrench into the gears of an already flailing meaningful use program.

As I have discussed at length here and here the meaningful use subsidy program for EHRs may have delivered hundreds of thousands of mediocre electronic health records systems into provider offices but has failed to deliver effective data sharing. ONC knows this is an issue, is aware of and discussed the JASON report, has its own “10-year vision” and emphasizes interoperability in its recently released Health IT Strategic Plan (Disclosure: I serve on the HIT Committee Consumer Workgroup, but these views are mine alone). But, some kind of showdown has been brewing for a while. Have the HITECH billions been wasted? Was the regulatory problem in meaningful use or in certification? Are the HIT developers to blame or health care providers? (Answer: Yes). And, the AMA being “appalled” aside, what happens now that the meaningful use carrots have begun morphing into sticks? Read More

February 9-13, 2015: Visit Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm to Learn More About Biobanking

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Timo Minssen

The following information has been extracted from the webpage of the BioBanking and Molecular Resource Infrastructure of Sweden on the course Biobanking as a Resource for Biomedical Research, February 9-13, 2015 at Karolinska Institutet (Stockholm). 

Purpose and Goal

Biobanks constitute a powerful resource in medical research with access to millions of samples and associated data collected within health care and in specific research studies. New “omic-technologies” with high-throughput analytical platforms now permit large scale analyses without the need to wait for years while new samples are being collected.

However, successful research based on human biological samples and associated data requires applied knowledge about how the samples have been collected and processed. Standardized procedures, controlled pre-analytical variables and study documentation are key factors for the reliability and validity of the analytical findings.

This one week course addresses fundamental concepts in biobank infrastructures and biobank research, ethical and legal frameworks, technologies, sample analysis and practical considerations when new samples are to be collected.  Read More

The Constitutional Implications of Ebola: Civil Liberties and Civil Rights In Times of Health Crises

Michele Goodwin Leave a comment

Join us for an important public forum:

Constitutional Implications of Ebola:
Civil Liberties & Civil Rights In Times of Health Crises

This public forum addresses the constitutional and public health implications of Ebola response in the United States.  According to state and federal laws, patient information is deemed private and is to be held in strict confidentiality.  However, in the wake of Ebola, well-established protocols to guard patient privacy have been neglected or suspended without public debate.  At this forum, a panel of experts raise questions not only about how to contain the disease, but also to what extent Americans value their healthcare privacy, civil liberties, and civil rights.  To what extent are Americans’ Ebola fears influenced by the origins of the disease?  What liberties are Americans willing to sacrifice to calm their fears?  How to balance the concern for public welfare with legal and ethical privacy principles?

Speakers: Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.;  Michele Goodwin, Chancellor’s Chair, UC Irvine School of Law;  Professor Andrew Noymer, UC Irvine School of Public Health; and Dr. George Woods, American Psychiatric Association.

This Forum intervenes in the current national and international discourse on Ebola by probing law’s role in addressing public health crises.  This forum is free and open to the public.

WHEN: Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 3.30pm-5.30pm

WHERE: University of California Irvine, School of Law; ROOM EDU 1111, 401 E Peltason Dr, Irvine, CA 92612

Ebola and Privacy

Michele Goodwin Leave a comment

By Michele Goodwin

As the nation braces for possibly more Ebola cases, civil liberties should be considered, including patient privacy.  As news media feature headline-grabbing stories about quarantines,  let’s think about the laws governing privacy in healthcare. Despite federal laws enacted to protect patient privacy, the Ebola scare brings the vulnerability of individuals and the regulations intended to help them into sharp relief.

In 1996, Congress enacted the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to protect patient privacy.  Specifically, HIPAA’s Privacy Rule requires that healthcare providers and their business associates restrict access to patients’ health care information.  For many years, the law has been regarded as the strongest federal statement regarding patient privacy. But it may be tested in the wake of the Ebola scare with patients’ names, photographs, and even family information entering the public sphere.

Ebola hysteria raises questions not only about how to contain the disease, but also to what extent Americans value their healthcare privacy.  What liberties are Americans willing to sacrifice to calm their fears?  How to balance the concern for public welfare with legal and ethical privacy principles?  For example, will Americans tolerate profiling travelers based on their race or national origin as precautionary measures?  What type of reporting norms should govern Ebola cases?  Should reporting the existence of an Ebola case also include disclosing the name of the patient?  I don’t think so, but the jury appears out for many.

HHS Issues Guidance on Same Sex Spouses and HIPAA

Leslie Francis Leave a comment

By Leslie Francis

[Cross-posted at HealthLawProfs blog.]

Under HIPAA, patients’ spouses and other family members have certain rights to access health information. In an important guidance document in the wake of United States v. Windsor, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at HHS has clarified that “spouse” under HIPAA refers to legally married same-sex spouses, even if the individual is receiving services in a jurisdiction not recognizing same-sex marriage.  Read More