TGIF

David Ermer–Uncategorized–

Let’s kick off the weekend with some career move announcements:

  • Earlier this week, OPM announced “the hiring of a new permanent Chief Information Officer (CIO). David De Vries, currently the Principal Deputy Chief Information Officer at the Department of Defense, will join OPM as CIO in the coming weeks. De Vries joins OPM after a distinguished career spanning more than 35 years at the Defense Department, the last seven in the Senior Executive Service in DoD CIO. While at the Defense Department, De Vries was instrumental in the transition of DoD information technology (IT) to a single, secure department-wide architecture—similar to the plan OPM has been implementing. De Vries was also influential in the Defense Department’s cybersecurity initiatives.”  
  • Yesterday, as Health Data Management reports, “Karen DeSalvo, national coordinator for health information technology, will be leaving her technology office position, to be replaced by Vindell Washington, MD, currently serving as the principal deputy national coordinator at ONC.” Ms. DeSalvo is moving to another position at HHS.
You won’t be seeing anymore links to Business Insurance.  The FEHBlog as a longtime subscriber to that publication was surprised to read yesterday that “The Aug. 1 issue of Business Insurance was its last print issue; the website, businessinsurance.com, and the Business Insurance events business will cease operation as of Aug. 9.”  Sayonara. 
Employee Benefits News offers an interesting cost containment idea – employers should require employees to visit their primary care doctor.  As it stands, employers including the federal government incent employees to prepare their own health risk assessments and undergo biometric screening. Why not cut out the middleman and require wellness visits with a healthcare provider.  After all the ACA requires group health plans to cover an annual in-network wellness visit with no-cost sharing.  As the article points out, “if incentivizing employees by seeding their HSAs or offering wellness events are not encouraging them to maintain quality health, employers should penalize employees who are not doing regular check-ups by increasing healthcare cost.”  That seems to be the direction where we are headed. No judgments here.

Finally, Fierce Healthcare discusses two New England Journal of Medicine articles on the hospitalist profession which was successfully launched 20 years.