Harrison Medical Center wasn’t able to provide us with patient payment data on short notice for our Monday story on health exchange enrollment. They were kind enough to send over a breakdown of emergency room visits by payment type today. It’s posted below.
After the opening of the exchange, and expansion of Medicaid, the Harrison ER saw a drop in the number of patients paying out of pocket and a surge in Medicaid payments, particularly under managed care plans. The number of patients covered under private plans actually dropped slightly.
The exchange is still compiling information about how many people who enrolled through Healthplanfinder were previously uninsured. We should have that information later this year.
It’s funny how efficient Harrison is when distributing people’s personal information, but when it comes to actually providing some useful data, they come up a day late and a dollar short.
And to think that former Harrison Hospital HR person says she has a “passion for mining data” on her Linkedin. Too funny.
To Harrison’s credit, I really did give them short notice last week and they went out of their way to compile this information for us.
Hipaa has been the law for 18 years. It’s past time Harrison Hospital got up to speed.
Requests from the media for data is only going to help Harrison Hospital determine what information is appropriate for release to the public and what is not. It sounds like common sense, but a lot of those clerical positions, the people actually handling the sensitive material, are filled by high school graduates and professional conduct has to be taught to them. It isn’t something they are going to pick up at home or on campus.
The attorney Anne Bremner of Seattle was speaking to someone about the deputy sheriff from Everett who is accused of tipping off the baristas to potential raids. She said if he used information he learned through his job in his personal life, he was committing a felony. It was some kind of public trust law or something, I didn’t catch it all. I assume that’s the rule for public employees. I don’t know what the rules are for a private company like Harrison Hospital. I assume they have some kind of internal code of conduct, in addition to the HIPAA laws, but who knows? I’ve heard some pretty nasty stories coming out of the Harrison Hospital break room.
Harrison does have an attorney don’t they, to help them when a Board member of staff member has crossed ethical or legal lies? And professional liability insurance?