About health insurance/insurers
UnitedHealth, Centene get Medicare Advantage Star Rating upgrades “UnitedHealthcare and Centene have received higher Medicare Advantage star ratings for the 2025 plan year after the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services revised their scores.
On Monday, CMS published updated Medicare Advantage Star Ratings program data that reveal the agency increased the quality ratings for 12 UnitedHealthcare contracts and seven Centene contracts, each of which comprise multiple Medicare Advantage plans…
Centene gained its sole four-star contract under the recalculations CMS disclosed Monday. Two UnitedHealthcare contracts were upgraded to five stars and three to four stars, giving the UnitedHealth Group subsidiary 37 contracts rated at least four stars.
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas ordered CMS to redo UnitedHealthcare’s scores last month in a case involving how the agency evaluated the company’s call center services. Centene initiated a similar lawsuit in October, which is still on the docket, as is a complaint from Humana. Elevance Health and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana sued over their scores on different grounds.”
About hospitals and healthcare systems
Inova first to earn Joint Commission's health data certification “Falls Church, Va.-based Inova has become the first health system in the U.S. to achieve The Joint Commission's Responsible Use of Health Data certification.
Launched Jan. 1, the voluntary certification program recognizes hospitals and health systems for ethical practices in using data beyond clinical care, such as for safety and quality work or operational improvements. The certification provides a framework for healthcare organizations to safely use and transfer patient data, ensuring transparency and responsible use.”
And in a related article:Biggest hospital cyberattacks of '24
About the public’s health
House COVID-19 panel releases final report: 3 key takeaways From the Republican controlled House: “The report starts with the finding that the SARS-CoV-2 virus ‘likely emerged because of a laboratory or research related accident…’
The report is critical of many of the mitigation measures that were employed early on in the pandemic.
It found masks and mask mandates were ‘ineffective at controlling the spread of COVID-19.’ Several studies, including one published this August, have found masking in public has an effect on lowering respiratory viral transmission, though this should not be the sole measure used to mitigate spread.
Further, the report concluded lockdowns caused ‘more harm than good’ to the economy, overall health of Americans and development of children…
The subcommittee’s report paid particular attention to the actions of EcoHealth Alliance, the nongovernmental organization that subawarded NIH grants to global labs including the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Echoing criticism from members of the subcommittee, the report found EcoHealth failed to carry out proper oversight of the experiments it provided funding for, facilitated gain-of-function research and misled the NIH on the details of its research projects.
The NIH in turn was found to have failed in its oversight of EcoHealth.”
Treatment patterns in patients with newly diagnosed COPD in the USA “Overall, during the 4-year follow-up period, 32.9% of the patients had at least one moderate or severe exacerbation, and 25.8% and 13.8% experienced moderate and severe exacerbations, respectively. At diagnosis, 86.2% of the patients were untreated and most remained untreated by the end of the follow-up (63.8%).”
About healthcare IT
The invisible wasteland of health care data According to a 2019 report from the World Economic Forum, the average hospital produces approximately 50 petabytes of data per year, with 97% of the data going unused. To put that enormous number in perspective, this is the equivalent of streaming a two-hour movie about 25 million times annually. Multiply that number by the over 6,000 hospitals in the United States, and the amount of data becomes incomprehensibly large. And that report was from five years ago — the numbers are likely even higher now!…
Based on carbon dioxide production per unit of electricity estimates from the Environmental Protection Agency, some experts have stated that storing 100 gigabytes of data — about the size of many modern hard drives — in the cloud over a year would produce 0.2 tons of carbon dioxide. By this logic, a typical hospital in the United States employing a similar storage strategy would have a carbon footprint of 100,000 tons from its digital data storage alone. Furthermore, this would mean that digital waste would be responsible for 97,000 tons of the carbon dioxide produced. The U.S. health care sector is responsible for over 8% of the country’s carbon emissions annually, yet many estimates don’t factor the toll of digital waste into the carbon footprint.”