What You Should Know:
- A new report from Paubox reveals that email remains the number one source of HIPAA breaches, with 107 incidents reported in the first half of 2025 alone.
- The analysis identifies a critical flaw in popular platforms like Microsoft 365, which prioritize message delivery over security, often stripping encryption without alerting the sender. With the OCR proposing to upgrade encryption from an "addressable" to a "required" safeguard, healthcare organizations
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Health IT | News, Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
The Organ Shortage Solution: Why Living Kidney Donation is Better Than Waiting for Xenotransplantation
Over 100,000 Americans are currently waiting for an organ transplant, and over 85% of those are in need of a kidney. As the demand for organ transplants continues to far outpace supply, increasing the number of organ donations remains an urgent priority. Most people are familiar with checking the box on their driver’s license, opting in to become an organ donor after death; but few realize that only three in 1,000 people pass away in circumstances that make organ
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Momentum Launches ‘Open Wearables’: The First Open-Source API Unifying 200+ Health Devices
What You Should Know:
- Momentum has launched Open Wearables, the industry’s first open-source platform designed to unify data from over 200 wearable devices—including Apple Health and Garmin—into a single, developer-friendly API.
- The new infrastructure eliminates the need for expensive proprietary SaaS aggregators, offering a self-hosted, HIPAA-compliant solution that drastically reduces integration time for healthcare startups. By standardizing data models for AI, Momentum
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ACA Open Enrollment 2026: Why Integrated Health Tech is Key to Navigating 23.4% Premium Spikes and Subsidy Uncertainty
The upcoming Affordable Care Act (ACA) Open Enrollment (OE) period presents at least three major challenges for health plans: Legislative changes, double-digit premium increases, and potentially expiring subsidies. To maintain membership and a positive user experience, health plans must carefully evaluate their approach to enrollment, engagement, and retention.
New rules are reshaping OE workflows, while price increases create affordability concerns for members. It’s difficult for
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Transparency Trap: Why Commercial Negotiated Hospital Rates Are Up to 32% Higher Than Cash Prices
What You Should Know:
- New analysis of Texas hospital price data reveals a transparency paradox: discounted cash prices for common services are often significantly lower than the rates hospitals negotiated with commercial insurers, according to a new research study from Trilliant Health.
- For diagnostic colonoscopies, the median cash price was 32% below the median negotiated rate. This disconnect means that employees on high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) and the employers who
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Beryl Institute Report Debunks 5 Physician Myths, Proving Patient Experience Drives Clinical Outcomes and Safety
What You Should Know:
- The Beryl Institute's new paper, From Myths to Truths: Reframing Physician Perceptions of Patient Experience, identifies and refutes five common misconceptions held by physicians regarding patient experience, moving the conversation from perceived overhead to proven necessity.
- The evidence-based analysis demonstrates that patient experience themes are directly linked to improved safety, better clinical adherence, optimized resource utilization, and
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VHC Health Answers Demand: Seamless Virtual Urgent Care Launches in D.C. Metro Area
What You Should Know:
-VHC Health, a community-based health system providing medical services to the Washington, DC metropolitan area, is proud to expand telehealth services through a strategic partnership with HealthTap, a tech-enabled virtual physician practice.
- This collaboration will enable VHC Health patients to receive on-demand virtual urgent care services from board-certified physicians, further enhancing the continuity and convenience of care offered by VHC
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Beyond Stereotypes: 3 Ways Empathetic Outreach Can Drive Medicaid Member Engagement and Retention Post-OBBA
Connecting with Medicaid members has never been so challenging—or so crucial—as the system faces great uncertainty in light of the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Finding inroads that resonate with members can be difficult as this diverse segment faces plenty of barriers to care that also inhibit meaningful connections. Non-medical social drivers of health, such as lack of transportation, food and housing insecurities, and even basic health literacy can get in the way of
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Evolve or Be Left Behind: The Quiet Reckoning for Health Insurance Agencies
The health insurance sector is facing a quiet but urgent reckoning: modernize or risk falling behind. While much of the industry’s attention has focused on consumer-facing innovations, like mobile apps and AI chatbots, the greater challenge may lie behind the scenes in the legacy systems that govern policy administration, enrollment, and commissions.
Back-office processes now shape agency competitiveness, investor confidence, and consumer trust. Over 70% of insurance customers prefer
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Hacking Healthcare Costs: 34% of Payers Prioritize AI and Analytics to Automate Operations and Drive Efficiency
What You Should Know:
- The latest HealthEdge’s 2026 Payer Survey reveals that managing costs remains the number one challenge for health plan executives, forcing a sharp reprioritization of technology investment toward Artificial Intelligence (AI) and modernization.
- AI automation is now the top strategy for cost reduction (34%), signaling a major shift away from legacy systems. However, a significant gap exists in customer experience, with only 51% of members viewing their health
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