About health insurance/insurers
The Effects of Medical Debt Relief: Evidence from Two Randomized Experiments “Two in five Americans have medical debt, nearly half of whom owe at least $2,500. Concerned by this burden, governments and private donors have undertaken large, high-profile efforts to relieve medical debt. We partnered with RIP Medical Debt to conduct two randomized experiments that relieved medical debt with a face value of $169 million for 83,401 people between 2018 and 2020. We track outcomes using credit reports, collections account data, and a multimodal survey. There are three sets of results. First, we find no impact of debt relief on credit access, utilization, and financial distress on average. Second, we estimate that debt relief causes a moderate but statistically significant reduction in payment of existing medical bills. Third, we find no effect of medical debt relief on mental health on average, with detrimental effects for some groups in pre-registered heterogeneity analysis.”
MA enrollees like breadth of plan options, Harvard research finds “Previous research from Harvard and Inovalon has found that MA enrollees have fewer hospitalizations, have greater challenge in overcoming social determinants of health, and have fewer inpatient hospital stays.
This white paper (PDF) also looks at enrollees in health maintenance organizations (HMOs), finding these individuals are three times more likely to be nonwhite than people in MA preferred provider organizations (PPO) plans. Additionally, utilization in HMOs is 29% lower than comparable MA PPO populations, meaning nearly $2,500 lower utilization per person.”
About hospitals and healthcare systems
How labor costs are tracking at 30 health systems FYI
About pharma
Clinical Benefit and Regulatory Outcomes of Cancer Drugs Receiving Accelerated Approval “ In this cohort study of cancer drugs granted accelerated approval from 2013 to 2017, 41% (19/46) did not improve overall survival or quality of life in confirmatory trials after more than 5 years of follow-up, with results not yet available for another 15% (7/46). Among drugs converted to regular approval, 60% (29/48) of conversions relied on surrogate measures.”
About healthcare IT
One-third of Healthcare Websites Still Use Meta Pixel Tracking Code “A recent analysis of healthcare websites by Lokker found widespread use of Meta Pixel tracking code. 33% of the analyzed healthcare websites still use Meta pixel tracking code, despite the risk of lawsuits, data breaches, and fines for non-compliance with the HIPAA Rules.”
How Regenstrief and HL7 are driving SDOH data standards “Launched in 2019, the Gravity Project is a national public-private collaborative aimed at creating consensus-based data standards for SDOH interoperability across the health, social services, public health and research sectors.
The community includes over 2,500 stakeholders across healthcare, health IT, payers, community-based organizations, government agencies and research institutions like Regenstrief Institute…
A new $4.4 million grant from the Regenstrief Foundation is looking to take the Gravity Project to the next level by standardizing social risk factors in appropriate terminologies…”
Surescripts exploring a sale: report “Dive Brief:
Healthcare IT giant Surescripts is looking for a buyer, according to a Tuesday report from Business Insider.
The electronic prescribing company has hired healthcare investment bank TripleTree to explore a sale — potentially to a private equity firm, according to the Business Insider report, citing sources familiar.
A private equity deal is logical, as a sale to a strategic player — like a payer with its own pharmacy benefit manager — could raise antitrust concerns, one expert told Healthcare Dive.”
Another ransomware group is seeking a payout from Change Healthcare, according to cybersecurity analysts “After the hackers responsible for the cyberattack on Change Healthcare took the ransom and ran in a reported exit scam, cybersecurity experts have found a new post that is seeking a payout from UnitedHealth Group to recover the data.
A post from RansomHub claims to have four terabytes of data stolen from Change, according to analyst Dominic Alvieri. The listing alleges that the administration of BlackCat, or ALPHV, stole a $22 million ransom payment made to recover the data.
Neither UnitedHealth nor Optum have confirmed that the payment was made, but researchers have identified payment logs that suggest the money changed hands.”