Dolly Parton is a talented artist, but most of us think of her as a country singer-songwriter. We were reminded of her strong acting chops when we re-visited the iconic film 9-to-5, where Dolly more than holds her own alongside greats Lilly Tomlin and Jane Fonda. For those of you that haven’t seen the 1980 film (or haven’t seen it in a while), it is worth the belly laughs over the inhumane things we ask the American workforce to do, and the clear demonstration of how you can run an office without a boss — but you cannot run an office without executive assistants. We also appreciate how the theme song, a real toe-tapper, calls coffee “a cup of ambition.” More on ambitious workforce issues in the One Thoughtful Paragraph.
Today’s news includes some work for people in healthcare:
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CMS sent a second round of warning letters to hospitals that have not complied with the hospital transparency rule, threatening to fine larger hospitals up to $2 million. These fines may be issued before the end of 2021.
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At this week’s meeting of the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (“HITAC” – the federal advisory council that helps the HHS Office of National Coordinator of Health IT or “ONC”), Micky Tripathi, the leader of ONC, explained how important TEFCA is — the federal government’s plan for a nationwide health information exchange. The Sequoia Project was there — the entity that is putting together the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (“TEFCA”) for ONC — presenting on elements of the Common Agreement and the QHIN Technical Framework. A recording of the event and materials are available here.
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To help learn more about this COVID-19 problem we are having, the CDC selected HealthVerity, a company that generates patient histories with de-identified data, to develop an interoperable dataset of more than 100 million patients for COVID-19 research. They also selected PointClickCare, a healthcare cloud company, to provide data sets on more than 5 million patients from long-term and post-acute care facilities.
