DOJ will talk with former UnitedHealth Group doctors
DOJ will talk with former UnitedHealth Group doctorsJenn Ackerman for STATThe Justice Department is interviewing former UnitedHealth Group physicians about their experiences working at practices owned by the health care giant, two sources with knowledge of the inquiries told STAT’s Tara Bannow. Representatives from the DOJ reached out recently to at least two physicians who were interviewed for STAT’s Health Care’s Colossus series. One of the doctors, Susan Baumgaertel, said she was recently contacted to discuss UnitedHealth by an attorney from the DOJ’s antitrust division who had read STAT’s articles. She said she plans to meet virtually with four government attorneys this week. Read more in Tara’s exclusive. from Healthcare Dive:Prospect Medical Holdings files for bankruptcy Prospect is the second large health system with a history of private equity ownership to declare bankruptcy in the past year. from Politico:Just over a year ago, the Department of Health and Human Services launched an information highway to instantly deliver patient data across health systems and give doctors more complete patient health histories.Since then, a growing list of health systems, payers and others have connected to the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, known as TEFCA.The electronic health records company Epic Systems, which covers 89 percent of acute care hospitals in the U.S., has connected more than 500 health systems to the network and plans to connect all its customers by the end of 2025.Epic has one of seven Qualified Health Information Networks, or QHINs, hooking doctors and others into the network. The Indian Health Service has also joined TEFCA.What does that mean? It’s too early to see much of an effect, says Dr. David Kaelber, a pediatrician and chief informatics officer at the Ohio-based critical access hospital MetroHealth.But TEFCA will eventually expand both the sources from which doctors can retrieve patient data and the depth of patient information.For now, obtaining a patient’s information from other health systems can be a dodgy process. “Patients assume that, as a doctor, I know all of their information,” Kaebler told Ruth. “What they don’t understand is a lot of times I don’t even have access to it.”He offers an example: He can’t access pre-2019 information about a 40-year-old patient because the state health information exchange provides data from only the past few years. With wider adoption of TEFCA, he could get much fuller patient records.What’s next: Kaelber says the biggest promise TEFCA offers is not just getting more information about patients’ past medical care, but also having the ability to incorporate new data sources into their care.Now, he can’t easily retrieve information from community behavioral health centers, nursing homes or dentist offices.Social service agencies, for example, maintain valuable patient data that provides insight into their health, such socioeconomic status or health care access, that could be shared more widely. “Information exchange there is not as robust as I think it could be if the vision for TEFCA is fully realized,” Kaelber said. The Department of Defense is testing artificial intelligence-fueled military medicine chatbots for weaknesses. In collaboration with the tech nonprofit Humane Intelligence, the DOD recently finished a pilot program evaluating large language model chatbots that summarize clinical notes and give medical advice. More than 200 people, including clinical providers and health care analysts, participated in the pilot, which compared three popular models.The results: The AI assurance pilot found more than 800 potential vulnerabilities and biases in the military medicine chatbots tested.Why it matters: “This program acts as an essential pathfinder for generating a mass of testing data, surfacing areas for consideration, and validating mitigation options that will shape future research, development, and assurance of GenAI systems that may be deployed in the future,” Matthew Johnson, who leads the responsible AI division of the DOD’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, said in a statement.
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