Here’s a link to OPM’s Federal Benefits Open Season kick off announcement.
The EEHBlog nearly fell off his chair today when he read that the ACA regulators recently updated the Affordable Care Act Summary of Benefits and Coverage templates for use in 2021. Here’s a link to the relevant HHS page and another to the relevant Labor Department page. The FEHBlog has not checked yet but he assumes that the templates posted on those pages are the same. Hint to the regulators — issue these updates on a regular cycle.
November is national diabetes month and the Centers for Disease Control has a useful website explaining how the widespread disease affects women differently than men.
Diabetes increases the risk of heart disease (the most common diabetes complication) by about four times in women but only about two times in men, and women have worse outcomes after a heart attack. Women are also at higher risk of other diabetes-related complications such as blindness, kidney disease, and depression.
Not only is diabetes different for women, it’s different among women—African American, Hispanic/Latina, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Asian/Pacific Islander women are more likely to have diabetes than white women.
On the healthcare data warehouse front, Healthcare Dive reports that Blue Health Intelligence, an arm of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, has agreed to contribute HIPAA de-identified claims data to the Health Care Cost Institute. HCCI also receives de-identified data from Aetna, Humana, Kaiser Permanente, and Medicare. HCCI advocates for lowering healthcare costs and shares data with researchers. In contrast, the Wall Street Journal has been drawing attention to an arrangement under which a very large health system, Ascension, has retained Google to organize its electronic data.
The data [housed in Google’s cloud] includes personally identifiable information like names and dates of birth; lab tests; doctor diagnoses; medication and hospitalization history; and some billing claims and other clinical records.
Neither doctors nor patients have been formally notified of the arrangement. Ascension, a Catholic nonprofit based in St. Louis, has more than 2,600 hospitals, nursing homes and other facilities in 21 states and Washington, D.C
The arrangement is permitted under federal health laws, according to the companies and some privacy experts. Still, it has drawn criticism amid heightened attention to data privacy.
“The optics are bad. The legal argument is tenuous. Ethically, this is a bad strategy. They need to tell people what they are doing,” said Ellen Wright Clayton, professor of biomedical ethics at Vanderbilt University.
The Journal reports that the agency responsible for enforcing the HIPAA privacy and security rules is kicking the arrangement’s tires.