TGIF

It’s the 70th anniverary of the Allies victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. Around noontime, the FEHBlog watched a World War II warplane flyover on the National Mall here in Washington, D.C.  Cool.

Here’s a link to the Week in Congress. The Senate joined the House of Represenatives this week in passing an FY 2016 budget resolution that includes reconciliation provisions to repeal the ACA. Timothy Jost reviews the ACA aspects of the budget resolution here.

Health Data Management reports on the latest Ponemon Institute study on health care related data breaches.

For the first time, criminal attacks are the leading cause of data breaches in healthcare, with such attacks up 125 percent versus five years ago, replacing lost laptops as the top cybersecurity threat to the industry. That is the finding of a new study by the Ponemon Institute, sponsored by security software and services vendor ID Experts, in which 45 percent of healthcare organizations indicate the root cause of their data breach was a criminal attack and 12 percent say it was due to a malicious insider.

Wow. The lost laptop problem was resolved by encryption. Hopefully it won’t be long before operating system data can be encrypted without disrupting operations.

Employee Benefit News reports on the growing patient and payer comfort level with telehealth services.

The U.S. telemedicine market is expected to reach $4.5 billion by 2018 – a massive gain from $440.6 million in 2013, notes a recent study by business information provider HIS. In addition, a recent Harris Poll found that 64% of the 2,019 U.S. adults it surveyed are willing to have doctor visits via video telehealth.
Employers are now warming up to the concept, which could save them more than $6 billion a year in health care costs, according to Towers Watson analysis. The consulting firm also found that 37% of U.S. employers with at least 1,000 employees expect to offer telemedicine consultations by 2015 compared with 22% in 2014 and another 34% are considering it for 2016 or 2017.

Drug Channels reports based on 2014 sales data that Walgreens and CVS sit on top of the pharmacy chain mountain.

Kaiser Health News reports based on a Harvard study that hospital closures generally do not adversely affect community health care.