Accretive Health Fails to Adequately Respond to Congress And Loses Contract with Second Hospital–A Total of Nine Notebooks Were Stolen or Missing

This keeps getting uglier and when you look at it, it was the business intelligence algorithms that drove all of this as that is the way to profit and make money.  Now there’s nothing wrong with that if you are ethically doing business, but as you read in the news, we are all of sudden finding a entire slew of folks who are not, surprised?  You shouldn’t be as this has been going on a long time but as folks getter smarter about the methodologies that have been used for a number of years, it’s all coming out.  Sure someone can like their business algorithms but if ethics are compromised in the act then what do we have?  Maybe I should ask someone on Wall Street about that while I’m at it.   What started all of this..a stolen notebook that shows their lack of ethics and HIPAA violations. 

Accretive Health Debt Collector Employee Has Laptop Stolen With Non Encrypted Patient Data from 2 Hospitals And Had Access to All the Data Via Revenue Cycling - Patient Information Was Shared With Wall Street Investors – Algorithms For Profit Again?

I wrote a post about 2 years ago on this blog in jest but I think it’s true now that “data addiction and abuse is the up and coming next 12 step program on the horizon”.   We need somewhere to rehab the folks that have this issue and look at the big Oncologist in the OC who did it for years with fraud, he said he couldn’t help himself and he was addicted.  Accretive though goes beyond addiction though and this is all about some marginal pay for performance incentives too.  Nobody is going to collect in fashions they have unless someone is waiving a dollar under their nose.  Maple Grove hospital has now cut them off as well. 

We also have some new information here…not one but nine notebooks were stolen so nine times the potential exposure possibly, depending on what they were carrying around.  The Vice President of the company left a non encrypted laptop with around 24k patients' information on the computer, gee and we wonder why executives are kind of useless today, but you could almost be he preaches to employees NOT to do this:)  This was also Chapter 28 of my Attack of the Killer Algorithm series. 

Accretive Medical Collections and Analytics Cited by Minnesota by Attorney General For Collecting from Patients At Bedside and Worse–Employees on Pay for Performance Too? Killer Algorithms Chapter 28

It looks like they are somewhat ignoring Congress too.  BD

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In a letter sent to Accretive Chief Executive Mary Tolan, U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman and U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette said a public statement that the company had provided the U.S. House's Committee on Energy and Commerce was "not an appropriate response" to a request for internal documents.

The congressmen also said Accretive had ignored repeated efforts to reschedule a May 4 meeting between the two sides that the company had earlier canceled.

http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/06/21/idINL3E8HL5FL20120621