Risk Management
While losses in the Obamacare exchange markets are chasing insurance giant UnitedHealthcare away, New England insurer Harvard Pilgrim Health Care says the exchange business is a major moneymaker.
Vermont led the country with 83 percent of hospitals earning 'A' grades while Maine and Rhode Island both came in second with 62.5 percent of hospitals earning top grades.
Nearly 800 hospitals earned the highest marks for safety in the Spring 2016 release of the Leapfrog Group's Hospital Safety Score, and report organizers say about 33,000 lives could be saved annually if every hospital performed that well.
The Leapfrog Group on Monday released its latest Hospital Safety Score rankings, assigning 15 hospitals with flunking grades for their record of incidents of patient harm and preventable death.
Five of the eight largest healthcare security breaches that occurred since the beginning of 2010 - those with more than 1 million records reportedly compromised - took place during the first six months of 2015, according to IBM X-Force's "2016 Cyber Security Intelligence Index."
Sixty percent of healthcare IT security executives are increasing spending for better data protection, according to a recent study. Another 46 percent plan to implement data security tools to catch up with industry best practices.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology is poised to deliver new cybersecurty guidance, according to NIST fellow Ronald Ross.
The healthcare industry accounted for the highest number of data breaches among service industries in 2015, according to a new 2016 Internet Security Threat Report from Symantec that also found ransomware on the rise and increasingly sophisticated attack tactics being perpetrated by organized criminals with extensive resources.
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center employees plan to walk off their jobs on Thursday to protest the hospital's alleged harassing of workers who want to form a union and to call for an immediate hike of the system's minimum wage to $15 an hour, according to the Service Employees International Union.
Lawmakers in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday sent a letter to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services acting administrator Andy Slavitt to delay releasing the latest quarterly Hospital Compare rankings over concerns that the methodology used to rate hospitals fails to account for a patient pool's social and income-level standings.