Healthcare Roundup: Amazon Pulling Plug on Amazon Care, Upcoming Changes to Medicaid Enrollment & More

Amazon Ending Major Foray into Primary Healthcare

Amazon announced last week that it will be ending operation of Amazon Care at the end of the year. The online retail giant piloted the urgent care and primary care service with its employees and their families in the Seattle area in 2019 and expanded it to employees across the country and then to other companies, including Whole Foods Market and Hilton. But in an email to employees, Neil Lindsay, senior vice president of Amazon Health Services, said Amazon Care wasn’t “the right long-term solution for our enterprise customers.”

“Although our enrolled members have loved many aspects of Amazon Care, it is not a complete enough offering for the large enterprise customers we have been targeting, and wasn’t going to work long-term,” he said.

The news comes a month after Amazon announced a $3.9 billion deal to acquire One Medical, a company that provides primary healthcare to over 8,000 employers and about 767,000 members. But that deal hasn’t closed yet and could be opposed by the Federal Trade Commission on antitrust grounds. (FIERCE HEALTHCARE, SEATTLE TIMES)

CMS Proposes Changes to Medicaid, CHIP Enrollment

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has proposed a new rule that would makes changes to the enrollment process for Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and Basic Health Programs, including imposing new requirements on states. Among other things the rule would limit renewals to once per year and require states to create a clear renewal process and follow specific guidelines before dropping a beneficiary due to returned mail.

The proposed changes come as states are preparing for the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency and the termination of the increased federal matching rate for Medicaid payments provided to states that agreed not to drop anyone from their Medicaid rolls for the duration of the public health emergency. (FIERCE HEALTHCARE, HEALTHCARE DIVE)

PA High Court Ruling Could be Costly for Healthcare Providers

Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court has reversed a twenty-year-old rule requiring medical malpractice cases to be filed in the county where the instances of malpractice were alleged to have occurred. The ruling could increase the number of malpractice suits filed in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, where jurors are perceived to be more sympathetic to plaintiffs, potentially resulting in larger payouts from healthcare providers. (INSURANCE JOURNAL)

Cybersecurity Issues May Lie Ahead for Struggling Hospitals

Cash-strapped hospitals could become more vulnerable to cyberattacks as narrowing margins keep them from making necessary cybersecurity investments, according to a report released last week by Fitch Ratings. The agency said that although cybersecurity costs are rising, a successful attack would only make a struggling hospital’s financial situation worse and potentially impact its credit rating. Hospitals less able to recover from an attack could also potentially suffer “quality of care issues, reputational risk and further margin erosion.” (FIERCE HEALTHCARE)

Hospital Margins Suffer in July

The nation’s hospitals and health systems are seeing “some of the worst margins since the beginning of the pandemic,” according to the August issue of Kaufman Hall’s National Hospital Flash Report. In July hospitals gave up the gains they’d made in recent months, as a result of lagging outpatient volumes and rising expenses, the report said. (KAUFMAN HALL)

IN State with Most Medical Data Breaches

Indiana has endured more medical data breaches than any other state, with over 80 million records having been illicitly accessed since 2009, according to a report from Comparitech. About 78.8 million of those records were accessed in a single major incident involving insurer Anthem Inc. - now called Elevance Health Inc. - in 2015. (INDIANAPOLIS BUSINESS JOURNAL)

-- Compiled by KOREY CLARK