Tag: Ascension

Matthew’s health care tidbits: Hedge Funds that Do Health Care on the Side

Jun 5, 2023

Each time I send out the THCB Reader, our newsletter that summarizes the best of THCB (Sign up here!) I include a brief tidbits section. Then I had the brainwave to add them to the blog. They’re short and usually not too sweet! –Matthew Holt

Lots of news about bad behavior in health care this week, with real shots about patient & staff safety at home care company Papa, and Grail misinforming 400 people that they had cancer. But the prize for tone deafness this week comes from another very well funded health care provider system being heartless to its poorest patients.

This week it’s Allina, a Minnesota “nice” system which actually amended its Epic system so that clinicians could literally not book appointments or provide care to patients who owed Allina money. Clinicians on the sharp end of this were so appalled that they went on the record about their own employer to NY Times’ reporter Sarah Kliff. The most egregious example was a doctor unable to write a prescription for a kid that had scabies–an infectious parasitic disease–who was sharing one bed with two other kids!

Of course Allina also is on the low end of charity care provision (below 1% of revenues). In contrast ten employees make more than $1m a year and another 10 make more than $500,000.

We all know about egregious private equity funds investing in payday loans and other scummy outfits that prey on the poor. Turns out that if you let a non-profit hospital become beholden to its financial, rather than moral, north star, it starts to behave in a similar manner. Allina, of course, had a smidge under $4bn in its “investment reserve” at the end of 2021. It’s by no means special. UPMC has over $7bn in its reserves (unclear if this includes the investments it has made in startups), while Ascension has a formal private equity fund that controversially paid its former CEOs over $10m as part of its $18bn reserves.

Somehow having hedge funds that provide a little health care service on the side doesn’t leave the best taste in the mouth for how we should be organizing this health care system.

The Intrusion of Big Tech into Healthcare Threatens Patients’ Rights

Dec 24, 2019• 1

By ANDREW DORSCH, MD

The question of how much time I spend in front of the screen has pestered me professionally and personally.

A recent topic of conversation among parents at my children’s preschool has been how much screen time my toddlers’ brain can handle. It was spurred on by a study in JAMA Pediatrics that evaluated the association between screen time and brain structure in toddlers. The study reported that those children who spent more time with electronic devices had lower measures of organization in brain pathways involved in language and reading.

As a neurologist, these findings worry me, for my children and for myself. I wonder if I’m changing the structure of my brain for the worse as a result of prolonged time spent in front of a computer completing medical documentation. I think that, without the move to electronic medical records, I might be in better stead — in more ways than one. Not only is using them potentially affecting my brain, they pose a danger to my patients, too, in that they threaten their privacy.

As any practicing physician can tell you, electronic medical records represent a Pyrrhic victory of sorts. They present a tangible benefit in that medical documentation is now legible and information from different institutions can be obtained with the click of a button — compared to the method of decades past, in which a doctor hand-wrote notes in a paper chart — but there’s also a downside.

Patient-Directed Uses vs. The Platform

Dec 18, 2019• 4

By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD

This piece is part of the series “The Health Data Goldilocks Dilemma: Sharing? Privacy? Both?” which explores whether it’s possible to advance interoperability while maintaining privacy. Check out other pieces in the series here.

It’s 2023. Alice, a patient at Ascension Seton Medical Center Austin, decides to get a second opinion at Mayo Clinic. She’s heard great things about Mayo’s collaboration with Google that everyone calls “The Platform”. Alice is worried, and hoping Mayo’s version of Dr. Google says something more than Ascension’s version of Dr. Google. Is her Ascension doctor also using The Platform?

Alice makes an appointment in the breast cancer practice using the Mayo patient portal. Mayo asks permission to access her health records. Alice is offered two choices, one uses HIPAA without her consent and the other is under her control. Her choice is:

Enter her demographics and insurance info and have The Platform use HIPAA surveillance to gather her records wherever Mayo can find them, or
Alice copies her Mayo Clinic ID and enters it into the patient portal of any hospital, lab, or payer to request her records be sent directly to Mayo.

Alice feels vulnerable. What other information will The Platform gather using their HIPAA surveillance power? She recalls a 2020 law that expanded HIPAA to allow access to her behavioral health records at Austin Rehab.

Alice prefers to avoid HIPAA surprises and picks the patient-directed choice. She enters her Mayo Clinic ID into Ascension’s patient portal. Unfortunately, Ascension is using the CARIN Alliance code of conduct and best practices. Ascension tells Alice that they will not honor her request to send records directly to Mayo. Ascension tells Alice that she must use the Apple Health platform or some other intermediary app to get her records if she wants control.

What Google Isn’t Saying About Your Health Records

Nov 14, 2019

By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD

Google’s semi-secret deal with Ascension is testing the limits of HIPAA as society grapples with the future impact of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Glenn Cohen points out that HIPAA may not be keeping up with our methods of consent by patients and society on the ways personal data is used. Is prior consent, particularly consent from vulnerable patients seeking care, a good way to regulate secret commercial deals with their caregivers? The answer to a question is strongly influenced by how you ask the questions.

Here’s a short review of this current and related scandals. It also links to a recent deal between Mayo and Google, also semi-secret. A scholarly investigative journalism report of the Google AI scandal with London NHS Foundation Trust in 2016 might be summarized as: the core issue is not consent; it is a conflict of interest at the very foundation of the information governance process. The foxes are guarding the patient data henhouse. When the secrecy of a deal is broken, a scandal ensues.

The parts of the Google-Ascension deal that are secret are likely designed to misdirect attention away from the intellectual property value of the business relationship.