TGIF

Greeting from Madison Wisconsin whether the FEHBlog and his wife are helping their daughter celebrate her wedding on Friday.  A lot has been happening in the healthcare world so duty calls.

Here are links to Bloomberg Government and FCW.com articles on last Wednesday's House Oversight and Government reform committee hearing on the President's federal government reorganization plan. Also here's a link to the FEDWeek Issues brief on the proposed OPM reorganization.

Amazon is paying "roughly" $1 billion for a company called Pillpack. Pillpack provides chronically ill people with a thirty day supply of various prescribed medicines in daily blister packs. The service is available in the continental U.S and Alaska. The FEHBlog heard about this innovative company a few years ago at an Express Scripts conference. The Wall Street Journal reports that PillPack “has never achieved much retail share,” Raymond James & Associates said in a note to investors. Nevertheless the acquisition shows that Amazon is serious about breaking into the mail order drug business.

The FEHBlog agrees with this Wall Street Journal observation:

[T]he health-care market may be challenging for Amazon to disrupt. It is highly regulated, and depends on a complex web of contracts, interconnected data systems and other relationships with health plans, drug-benefit managers and other health-care players that Amazon may not want to alienate if it wants its pharmacy business to prosper.

For more details on this transaction, check out this Drug Channels blog post.

Health IT Security breaks down the healthcare breach data found in the FBI's 2017 Internet Crimes report.

Finally here are Fortune and RevCycleIntelligence articles on creating uses to applying social determinants of health. Check them out.