Healthcare Empowered

Will Maddox, for D Magazine:

HB 1998 bars physicians who have committed moral terpitude felonies and misdemeanors from practicing in Texas and requires the Texas Medical Board to have closer oversight of physicians.

This year’s legislative session scored significant victories for patient safety advocates. Until this year, it was possible for out-of-state physicians who have been convicted of felonies or misdemeanors related to moral turpitude to be able to come to Texas and continue to practice. Before HB 1998 was signed into law in 2023, a physician from other states could come to practice in Texas even if their license was revoked, restricted, or suspended in another state.

From ScienceBlog:

Physicians are using ChatGPT for many things, mainly to consolidate notes. There has been a lot of focus on using AI to quickly find answers to clinical questions, but a lot of practical interest among physicians has also been in summarizing visits or writing correspondence that everybody has to do, but nobody wants to do. A lot of that content has protected health information in it.

When physicians meet with their patients, they want to be fully engaged instead of taking notes. They may take brief notes but then have to elaborate on them for the medical record later. It’s much easier and better than the patient-physician interaction to have the physician focus on the patient and have the encounter be recorded and transcribed. Then the transcription could go into the Chat GPT window, which reorganizes it and summarizes it.

…

The protected health information is no longer internal to the health system. Once you enter something into ChatGPT, it is on OpenAI servers and they are not HIPAA compliant. That’s the real issue, and that is, technically, a data breach.

Press Release, Texas Attorney General:

Kenric Wakeen Griffin, co-owner of New Horizons Durable Medical Equipment based in Frisco, TX, was sentenced to 49 months of federal incarceration to be followed by a year of supervised release for his role in a medical equipment fraud scheme. In addition, Griffin was ordered to pay $5,114,016.19 in restitution to government health care programs. A jury convicted Griffin of conspiracy to defraud the United States and to pay and receive healthcare kickbacks, as well as seven counts of payment and receipt of kickbacks.

Griffin obtained patients by offering and paying kickbacks to marketers as well as disguising illegal payments as marketing services and outsourced business services. Griffin then submitted false claims to both Medicaid and Medicare for orthopedic equipment that was never provided, not medically necessary, and not authorized by a physician.

Steve Adler, for The HIPAA Journal:

The Biden Administration has unveiled its National Cyber Workforce and Education Strategy (NCWES) which seeks to address the current cyber workforce shortages and prepare the country for a cyber future.

The NCWES was developed by the Office of the National Cyber Director in collaboration with 34 agencies, departments, and EOP components and lays out a comprehensive approach for addressing immediate and long-term cyber workforce needs while ensuring all Americans have the cybersecurity skills they need to participate in the digital ecosystem.

The aim of the strategy is to empower all Americans looking to participate in the digital ecosystem, including communities that are currently underrepresented in the cyber workforce, and to promote and develop pathways for well-paying and fulfilling cyber careers. Under the strategy, the Biden Administration and its partners will leverage adaptable ecosystems to effect change at scale, enable the lifelong development of cyber skills, and grow and enhance the cyber workforce through diversity and inclusion.

The National Cyber Workforce and Education Strategy [PDF]

Texas Attorney General Press Release:

ApolloMDx offered illegal kickbacks in order to purchase both recipient information from marketers and orders for genetic testing from doctors. In some cases, doctors made fraudulent diagnoses to make it appear as though recipients were eligible for testing when they were not. In addition, ApolloMDx altered dates of service on testing orders to make it appear that multiple DNA samples were collected on different dates to enable billing for multiple dates of service.

Medical weight-loss locations have skyrocketed, driven by semaglutide medications. But a recent article from Chad Terhune, for Reuters, calls into question its staying power:

Only about one-third of patients prescribed a popular weight-loss drug like Novo Nordisk’s (NOVOb.CO) Wegovy were still taking it a year later, while total healthcare costs for the group rose sharply, according to an analysis of U.S. pharmacy claims shared with Reuters.

The annual cost of overall care for patients prior to taking Wegovy or a similar drug was $12,371, on average, according to the analysis. The full-year cost after starting the medication jumped by 59% to $19,657, on average.

Jill McKeon, for Health IT Security:

In June 2022, journalists discovered that a third of Newsweek’s top 100 hospitals in America had the Meta Pixel installed on their websites, which allegedly sent a packet of data to Facebook whenever a visitor clicked a button to schedule a doctor’s appointment. …

… The Markup, also observed the Meta Pixel operating inside the password-protected patient portals of seven health systems, sending patient names, medication information, and appointment details to Facebook. …

Following the article’s publication, an influx of breach notifications and lawsuits rolled in, with hospitals across the country admitting that tracking tech originally installed to measure and evaluate website visitor trends had inadvertently been disclosing sensitive information to tech companies such as Meta and Google.

In the year since these discoveries were made, healthcare data security and privacy experts have raised concerns not only about why this technology remains so widespread across healthcare, but why many hospitals were not even aware that this tech was quietly operating on their systems for years.

Understanding the root causes of this issue requires a deep dive into what this tracking tech promises to provide its customers, and the communication, technical, and regulatory gaps that contributed to this problem going unnoticed at some healthcare organizations.