Weekend update

According to OPM, the Federal Benefits ends at 11:59pm, in the location of your electronic enrollment system, on Monday December 10, 2018.

Congress remains in session in Capitol Hill this coming week. Here's a link to the Week in Congress' report on last week's actions on the Hill.

Last week, the Leapfrog patient safety group issued its annual list of top hospitals. "Top Hospitals have better systems in place to prevent medication errors, higher quality on maternity care and lower infection rates, among other laudable qualities."

Health Data Management provided a sobering list of three cybersecurity predictions for 2019.

The same publication also reports that the Medical Group Management Association is pressing the Department of Health and Human Services to better enforce HIPAA's electronic transactions standards.

“The feds have a robust HIPAA privacy and security policy, but they have yet to issue a fine against a non-compliant health plan for ignoring HIPAA rules,” says Robert Tenant, IT policy director at MGMA. “And, prior authorization transactions are not yet supported by health insurers.”

Further, use of the HIPAA attachment standard remains problematic after all these years—a provider can submit a claim or encounter, but the health plan routinely will want more documentation before accepting the claim or encounter.

The FEHBlog's long standing solution to this problem is to repeal the electronic transactions standard as it's difficult for the law to keep pace with technology. The FEHBlog expects that the industry could provide a better long term approach.

While on the IT topic, it's worth noting that Healthcare Dive reports that a group of health insurers, including Aetna, Humana, and United Healthcare,  and providers, including the largest Catholic healthcare system in the U.S., Ascension, seek to apply blockchain technology to the knotty problem of keeping provider directors up-to-date.

The blockchain alliance's pilot uses a multi-company, multi-site, permissioned blockchain, which allows each member to determine how its nodes are deployed, according to a new white paper. "[Ethereum-based] Quorum nodes use the go-ethereum client to maintain transaction data that is visible to all network participants as well as private data that is visible only to parties of private transactions," according to the paper. "Private transactions are enabled through the Constellation extension of Quorum."