Becker's Hospital Review

44 CIO / HEALTH IT 4 CIOs on retail disruptors' efforts to improve patient access, convenience By Katie Adams I n the past decade, giant retailers and startups alike have tried to disrupt traditional health- care delivery by increasing patient access and convenience, with varying levels of success. Below, four CIOs from hospitals and health systems across the country share their thoughts on these efforts. Editor's note: Responses were lightly edited. Brian Herrick, MD. CIO of Cambridge (Mass.) Health Alliance: e biggest retail disruption so far to healthcare has been con- venience. Healthcare has been built based on what is easiest for the healthcare system to de- liver great care. e introduction of retail into healthcare has people voting with their feet. Convenience is one of the most important factors for people choosing where to seek care and the big stores know how to deliver con- venience. is competition has forced a para- digm shi for traditional healthcare providers — to start to think of care delivery from the patient perspective and move from great care to exceptionally patient-centered care. Zafar Chaudry, MD. Senior Vice President and CIO of Seattle Children's: Certainly the venture of Walmart into the health superstore space has been a shining light of how retail can disrupt healthcare with a model of keeping it simple, cost effective, convenient, patient-cen- tric and helping to increase access to care in the community. Walmart has made use of dig- ital tools to enable this but the challenge with speed of adoption by consumers to consume retail based healthcare, however, is that many consumers still prefer to receive healthcare services from their own physician or hospital. Ash Goel, MD. Senior Vice President and CIO of Bronson Healthcare (Kalamazoo, Mich.): e key to a persistent and sustain- able model that creates disruption in the retail healthcare delivery sector is a set of wraparound services that acts as a consumer's navigator, ad- vocate, educator and financial advisor-in-chief while creating pricing alignment between pay- ers, pharmacies, hospitals and providers. is can only be done by taking on the whole set of products and technologies that provide the en- tire gamut of what a consumer might want. e current retail disruption that is happen- ing is in parts and pieces of this continuum, as the financial models are not yet readily aligned to these consumer-centric needs. Various startups that have worked to pick up individual pieces (telehealth, pharmaceutical retail, employee health) but very few (if any) have considered a longitudinal approach to these services (which is where disruption will have to happen). Waiting to see if one of these will grow into such a dynamic disruptor. Michael Restuccia. Senior Vice President and CIO for Corporate Information Ser- vices at Penn Medicine (Philadelphia): I think the easiest answer to the question of identifying retail disruptors that have im- proved patient access and convenience are the telemedicine vendors. For years, telemedicine technology has existed to advance access and convenience, but only recently has the reim- bursement and regulations caught up with the technology. Perhaps, what is most intriguing about the posed question, is the difficulty in identifying successful retail disruptors in the healthcare industry. As we have seen, many prominent names have tried, not succeeded and learned in the process that healthcare IT is hard! It takes great commitment to be a disruptor in health- care, so perhaps the Cerners, Epics, Meditechs are the true disruptors in this space. n Medical debt collector reaches 40-state settlement for data breach that exposed 21 million patients' info By Katie Adams A merican Medical Collection Agency on March 11 reached a settlement with 40 states and Washing- ton D.C., to resolve a complaint following a 2019 cyberattack that exposed 21 million Americans' personal information, including Social Security numbers, diagnoses and credit card information. The Elmsford, N.Y.-based company specializes in small- balance medical-debt collection and offers services most- ly for laboratories and medical testing facilities. Between Aug. 1, 2018, and March 30, 2019, an unauthorized user gained access to AMCA's internal network and collected customers' personal information. According to documents from the bankruptcy court of New York's southern district, AMCA received various warnings from banks that processed its payments, but it failed to detect the breach. On June 3, 2019, AMCA gave 40 states and Washington, D.C., notice of the cyberattack. The company also notified affected individuals and offered them two years of free credit monitoring. On June 17, 2019, AMCA filed for bankruptcy because of costs associated with the data breach. The bankruptcy court later granted the company permission to settle with the 40 states and Washington, D.C., and AMCA filed for dismissal of the bankruptcy Dec. 9, 2020. Under the March 11 agreement, AMCA agreed to imple- ment certain data security practices, including deploying a detailed information security program with an incident response plan, cooperating with attorneys' general ongo- ing investigations and maintaining evidence, and hiring a chief information security officer and a third-party infor- mation security assessor. If it violates any of the data security practices above, AMCA may also be liable for a $21 million payment to the states. n

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