From the Department of Why Didn’t This Happen 15 Years Ago? comes a whole bunch of matter-of-fact reporting on a Government Accountability Office report on whether Medicare should switch to electronically readable ID cards.
A sampling of headlines from the past 24 hours:
- Should Medicare make the switch to electronic cards? (Modern Healthcare)
- Medicare Could Benefit from Electronically Readable Cards (Health Data Management)
- GAO: Switching to Electronic Medicare Cards Could Reduce Fraud (iHealthBeat)
- Smart cards would do little to curtail Medicare fraud: GAO (McKnight’s Long Term Care News)
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Munck Wilson Mandala Partner Greg Howison shared his perspective on some of the legal ramifications around AI, IP, connected devices and the data they generate, in response to emailed questions.
This raises two important questions: Did iHealthBeat and McKnight’s read the same report?; and why is healthcare so horribly mired in the Stone Age?
It’s 2015 and the largest health insurer in the United States still relies on paper ID cards. Does this not bother anybody?
Lest you think it’s just the government that’s far behind, my current insurer and my new insurer starting the first of May, both private companies, do print barcodes on the back of their ID cards, but does that even matter? Every healthcare provider I’ve gone to recently hasn’t scanned the barcode, but just made a photocopy of both sides of the card, then manually entered the number into their billing system.
Where I live, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, the largest private payer in the state, has long been running commercials featuring happy people showing off their membership cards, as if having a card is the coolest thing about insurance. Maybe I’m nitpicky, but these ads have always upset me.
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At the Abarca Forward conference earlier this year, George Van Antwerp, managing director at Deloitte, discussed how social determinants of health and a personalized member experience can improve medication adherence and health outcomes.
The cards are made out of laminated paper. The barcode on the back is rather useless at medical offices and pharmacies, as far as I can tell. And to think this is considered advanced in healthcare today, at least compared to Medicare.
Then again, we just ran a MedCitizens post this week about how the quaint, old fax machine still represents the norm in obtaining copies of medical records. It’s 2015. Why can’t we do better?
