If you forget how this all was started it was due to a stolen computer with company personnel sharing actual patient data with investors on Wall Street.  The link below can bring you up to date.  As Steven Colbert called them the “debt panels”.  I hope the patients get some restitution out of all of this.  The attorney though for the company is pretty confident I must say from reading this article as he says it was easier to settle  as doing business in the state was becoming too difficult?  Oh well, just one more corporate excuse. 



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 have a series called the “Attack of the Killer Algorithms” as the algos here that attacked were pay for performance for part of the issue.  This was Chapter 28.  Again remember it’s the algorithms for profit that are formulas that drive traffic that create all of this. 

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

What is also interesting is that the attorney also says the Attorney General could not identify a single patient who had been abused, so I guess he doesn’t read the news as we saw plenty interviewed and quite a few who spoke out.  He must be getting one huge fee to cover this case.  The company was not even responsive to Congress either, so again sound quite arrogant to me.  Sure someone can like their business algorithms but if ethics are compromised in the act then what do we have? 

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


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.  So the attorney is defending the Vice President here, an executive with a title that is supposed to set examples for others but not at this company.  BD    



Accretive Health will be barred from operating in Minnesota for two to six years under a settlement agreement announced Monday by Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson.

The agreement ends a six-month legal battle in which Swanson had accused the Chicago consulting firm of deceiving patients, harassing them for money in emergency rooms and mishandling patient data at Fairview and North Memorial hospitals.

Under the agreement, Accretive will pay about $2.5 million to the state of Minnesota as part of a "restitution fund" administered by a retired judge to compensate patients.

Some patients said they were asked to pay while in the emergency room, lying on a gurney or hooked up to morphine. One woman said she was asked for payment while she was being treated for a miscarriage.

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/164313776.html?refer=y&refer=y

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