David Harlow is the Principal of The Harlow Group LLC, a health care law and consulting firm based in the Hub of the Universe, Boston, MA. His 30 years’ experience in the public and private sectors affords him a unique perspective on legal, policy and business issues facing the health care community. David is a charter member of the external Advisory Board of the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network and has served as the Public Policy Chair of the Society for Participatory Medicine, on the Health Law Section Council of the Massachusetts Bar Association and on the Advisory Board of FierceHealthIT. He speaks regularly before health care and legal industry groups on business, policy and legal matters. Keep track of what he is doing at HealthBlawg and on Twitter @healthblawg.
Health insurance companies are right to think that there is some magic that can happen when the relationships between payers and providers are rationalized. However, it is far from clear that what is good for the conglomerate is good for the patient.
The theft of two unencrypted laptops from Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield put the personal health information of about 840,000 plan members at risk.
As technology advances, AI-powered tools will increasingly reduce the administrative burdens on healthcare providers.
The Federal Trade Commission has issued new guidance to businesses that collect and share consumer health information.
Aside from the current congressional logjam, gridlock or whatever your preferred metaphor may be, consider the fact that we are now embarking upon the general election season, which tends to add an additional layer of grandstanding and substantive paralysis to the usual fever dreams of the Potomac.
They want to harness “big data” to solve big problems in healthcare.
Healthcare needs to recognize that enforcement action will continue, and compliance should be a key business objective.
The future looks bright for the integrated specialty pharmacy model – for health systems, providers, and most importantly, for patients.
The health innovation crowdfunding crowd has been waiting for these rules for quite some time, as has the rest of the crowdfunding fan club. Was it worth the wait?
As the federales have been saying for some time now, the day of reckoning is coming for more covered entities — and now for business associates, too. OCR is inching closer to conducting more HIPAA audits
A number of the Pioneer ACOs dropped out of the program, so even the more “advanced” participants are not uniformly delivering the best possible results.
There is enormous untapped potential in the N-of-1 clinical trial.
Executives from Imagine360, Verily, BrightInsight, Lantern, and Rhapsody shared their approaches to reducing healthcare costs and facilitating digital transformation.
Pointing out the problems is the easy part. Action is the next big step.
The Meaningful Use – Stage 3 proposed rule has been released, with official publication due on March 30. Llikewise, the 2015 edition of EHR certification criteria and related rules. Check out the CMS presser and ONC fact sheet. Key to these rules, which lay the foundation for a post-Meaningful Use incentive-driven Health IT ecosystem, is […]
Anthem experienced a major data breach last week, and reportedly some records (Social Security Numbers and other identifying information, but not health data) of up to 80 million members and employees were obtained by hackers. There is much to be said (and much has already been said) about the need for privacy and security and protections […]
This week, Connecticut joined at least nine other states (DE, KY, ME, MN, MO, NC, TN, UT, WV — see cases cited in the opinion, linked to below) in recognizing that, while HIPAA does not create a private right of action for violation of privacy, it does constitute a standard against which the actions of […]
Efforts to reduce hospital readmissions have been focused on a handful of diagnoses and on government payors (primarily Medicare). In order to get a handle on the roughly 15% of the U.S. health care spend that goes to readmissions, it is vital to have a better understanding of what these readmissions are for, who is […]