Top Healthcare News, Week of November 18, 2019
Attention: Nike has released its latest and greatest shoe designed for medical professionals.
Google and Ascension’s ‘Secret’ Partnership Sparks Widespread Controversy
A bombshell report released by the Wall Street Journal Monday pulled back the curtain on the highly secret ‘Project Nightingale,’ which is a current partnership between Google and Ascension – one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the U.S.
According to the WSJ, the project began in secret sometime last year when Ascension began sharing its vast patient data – including complete health histories, patient names and dates of birth – with up to 150 Google employees.
The aftermath.
The WSJ report immediately went viral (or, as viral as a healthcare article could get). In an almost immediate response, Google issued a press release the same afternoon detailing its partnership with Ascension, stating that the business relationship is legal within HIPAA confines and has good intentions.
Ascension also released a statement, saying that the goals of the partnership are to improve patient outcomes and data usage.
That’s not stopping the Feds from opening an official probe into the partnership, though.
The 2 Sides of the Google and Ascension Controversy.
After doing a LOT of reading and research on this, there are essentially 2 schools of thought behind the Google and Ascension partnership.
Google and Ascension’s Side:
Google’s work with Ascension and its patient data is allowed by law because Google is defined as an Ascension business partner. Additionally, the data is hosted within an Ascension-owned virtual private space within the Google Cloud platform – separate from Google’s other business functions.
Per the agreement, none of the patient data will be used to sell ads or be monetized.
With Ascension’s help, Google is trying to find solutions to healthcare’s biggest problems. Those problems include common provider headaches like the lack of interoperability between patient medical records, advancing practical uses of artificial intelligence, and developing new technologies to leverage data for the purpose of achieving better clinical outcomes for patients.
In the long run, despite how it looks now, this partnership will be good for healthcare.
The Patient Privacy Side:
The optics surrounding the partnership don’t look good for Google and Ascension. Although the partnership started last year, nothing (beyond one word in Google’s second quarter 2019 earnings call) was mentioned about what was going on behind the scenes.
Ascension employees expressed concern about how the patient data was being shared with Google, yet nothing was addressed. And yet, as soon as the WSJ article was released, Google immediately sent out a press release.
Since Google is allegedly doing the work with Ascension for free, they clearly think that the project has extremely high value.
But no patient or provider was told how their individual, highly sensitive patient data was being used by a company with a not-so-great track record of handling consumer data.
The Washington Post detailed a failed partnership between Google and the NIH, where Google almost publicly posted 100,000 x-rays with patient data
These types of partnerships need more oversight.
Read about the controversy from the whistleblower’s perspective themselves on the Guardian here. It definitely highlights all of the relevant issues.
I think both sides have an argument here. Maybe Google and Ascension didn’t handle the partnership in a transparent way. But that doesn’t mean they had deviant or malicious intents behind their arrangement.
What do you think?
Walgreens might be going private in the biggest EVER leveraged buyout
In other big news this week, KKR made a formal bid to buy out Walgreens, confirming earlier reports of the rumored deal. The buyout would be the largest-ever public-to-private transaction, valued at about $73 billion as things stand today.
Some are questioning whether KKR can even raise enough funding to cover that value, but if I had to guess, I’d say they know what they’re doing.
UnityPoint and Sanford Systems Call Off $11 Billion Planned Merger
Out in the midwest, UnityPoint’s board of directors pretty concretely rejected (WSJ) its proposed merger with Sanford health.
The combination would have created a 76-hospital giant with operations across 26 states and $11 billion in operating revenue, executives said in June.
The cancelled merger joins the trend of called-off health system transactions – Baylor and Memorial Hermann in Texas, and then Ascension and Providence St. Joe’s up north.
Superbugs are a growing threat to health systems
As it turns out, superbugs are actually a bigger threat at this point than the CDC previously estimated. According to the agency, superbugs now cause almost 3 million infections and 35,000 deaths a year.
Policy Corner, week of Nov 18: Trump Admin releases big-time price transparency rule
The Trump administration’s finalized ruling for price transparency was released on the 15th.
Actual enforcement of the final ruling starts in January 2021, but there’s absolutely no question that it will be aggressively challenged in court.
Details of the price transparency rule.
Like we mentioned back in July, the rule will force hospitals to disclose reimbursement rates by insurer for 300 common procedures in a machine readable format.
Common procedures would include things like birth, outpatient surgeries, certain gastrointestinal exams, and more.
They’ll have to pay a $300 per-day fine if they choose not to release the info, which amounts to $110k per year. About the salary of an IT guy.
As you can imagine, this ruling is extremely contentious among payors and providers. Some experts don’t even think the finalized ruling is legal. Hospitals have already promised to take the Trump admin to court.
Lots of controversial topics this week, eh? Told ya healthcare isn’t boring.
- Here’s the finalized rule
- Here’s the other proposed rule that would affect health insurers.
Trump Admin delays the Vaping Ban.
In another twist this week, Trump is planning to delay the vaping ban after hearing from the industry and users.
While the administration wants to keep vapes out of the hands of children, Trump has also commented on vaping’s effectiveness in getting people to quit smoking.
And the last thing Trump wants to do in an election year is to hurt any jobs growth through vaping regulation
Quick Hits
Biz Hits
Rebranding: Providence St. Joseph is rebranding in 2020 to just ‘Providence’
All the Apple health news: Apple unveiled its medical research app this week. In a promising start to proving its clinical efficacy, Apple announced that its heart study had concluded and drew over 400,000 enrollees, which is an unprecedented amount of people for any clinical study. In other news, Apple’s electronic health records are now available to all 9 million military veterans. Don’t forget that the Department of Veterans Affairs is the largest integrated healthcare system in the nation.
CVS Success: CVS is finding early success with its HealthHUB strategy.
State Hits
Merger review: In North Carolina, the FTC is vetting the strategic partnership agreement previously made between Wake Forest Baptist Health and Atrium Health. The FTC is basically trying to figure out what differentiates the agreement made from an actual merger.
Other Hits
Kaiser Permanente’ CEO Bernard Tyson sadly unexpectedly passed away this week.
A timeline of the ACA, from the beginning, to the previous court challenges, to the current challenge.
A Florida judge might have just set a dangerous precedent regarding our DNA profile and privacy.
As more services move to the home, is senior housing facing (WSJ-paywall) stunting growth?
Here are the top 10 largest home health providers.
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