March 2018

By the Numbers
For The Record
Vol. 30 No. 3 P. 34

$17 Million
Aetna has agreed to pay this amount to settle claims of a privacy breach in which the company mailed envelopes with large, clear display windows that revealed confidential HIV information to about 12,000 customers. Aetna agreed to pay at least $500 to customers whose privacy was breached by the envelopes, as well as $75 to customers whose names were improperly disclosed to a mail vendor.

$20 Million
Aetna is suing Kurtzman Carson Consultants, LLC, an administrative support company, for "errors, omissions, and gross negligence" related to the mailing of the envelopes that potentially disclosed customers' HIV information.

8 out of 10
According to Avizia's "Closing the Telehealth Gap" report, this proportion of consumers are still largely unaware of how to access telehealth or whether their insurer will cover it.

629
A report from Manatt, Phelps & Phillips found that health systems and hospitals must comply with this number of regulatory requirements while spending $39 billion on related administrative costs each year, with the average hospital employing the equivalent of 59 full-time compliance workers. The report found that the average hospital spends nearly $760,000 annually to meet meaningful use requirements while investing $411,000 in related IT upgrades.

$2.3 Million
21st Century Oncology, a national cancer care provider headquartered in Fort Myers, Florida, agreed to pay a fine for this amount to Health and Human Services for a 2015 data breach that impacted more than 2.2 million patients.

$140,400
Healthcare IT News checked OpenSecrets.org and found that in 2017, Allscripts spent this amount lobbying the government, Athenahealth spent $550,000, Cerner spent $290,000, Epic Systems spent $108,000, and McKesson spent more than $1 million.

$50
For this amount, researcher Latanya Sweeney, PhD, and her team bought a year's worth of patient discharge data from Washington state and reidentified 43% of 81 samples by comparing the information to news blotters, according to Healthcare Analytics News. That experiment caused Washington to change its policy on data sales to one of tiered access: public, limited, and confidential data sets.