March 25, 2022
Maverick's Update
Only What Matters In Health Information Policy
To distract ourselves from the 19 hours of the televised political circus that is the U.S. Senate’s confirmation hearing of Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, we watched the heartbreaking video of a 7-year-old Ukrainian girl singing “Let It Go” from a bomb shelter in Kyiv. We wish the upcoming Oscars had an award for that sort of poignant piece of film, but we wouldn’t want little Amelia Anisovych to have to deal with what Idina Menzel suffered during the 2014 Oscars. If you don’t recall, that was the Academy Awards show where John Travolta managed to badly mispronounce Idina Menzel’s name, who is the performer of “Let It Go” in the Disney movie Frozen. Consumers may need to “let it go” when it comes to health data, as we explain in the One Thoughtful Paragraph below.
Other “let it go” news --
E.H.R. giant Epic Systems will have to let go of a huge damage award against a competitor for stealing its trade secrets after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear its case.
Healthcare Chief Information Officers want everyone to let go of the idea that CIOs are just computer geeks and start looking at them like strategic advisers.
UnitedHealthcare had to let go of its CIO, Carissa Rollins, so she could help Illumina, a company that sells genetic-sequencing products, accelerate its mission of personalized medicine.
One Thoughtful Paragraph
Should we let go of health data or not? We are cognizant of the fact that little Amelia was singing “Let It Go” in a bomb shelter because of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, which is what is giving rise to warnings about Russian-engineered cyberattacks from the FBI and CISA, the White House, and a new law requiring healthcare entities and others to report cyberattacks. But Russia is not our only health data security problem. Just this week, Politico reported on its analysis of HHS data from 2021, where it found that in nearly half of the states, more than 10% of people’s health information was exposed or leaked somehow. This is one of the reasons why a Health Data Privacy Commission is being considered by Congress, and the Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC) and HITRUST have announced a partnership to strengthen the health data security framework of the Trusted Network Accreditation Program. The threat to the privacy and security of our health data is very real, even as another potential COVID surge is causing public officials to worry that public health data is going unreported. Rather than letting it go and hoping for the best, we are trusting that our public and industry leaders will take the time to get this right.