Healthcare · Customer & Citizen Experience
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15 articles · Healthcare · Customer & Citizen Experience
Articles
Week of 24 August 2026
Health systems inherit the patients that IAL2 proofing turns away
Verified digital credentials were starting to unlock patient records across networks. For most people that is a welcome shortcut. Patients who cannot get one still depend on their health system, which needs deliberate routes for checking identity in-house and through people who vouch.
Week of 4 May 2026
Why a hospital’s accessibility deadline now sits in its vendor contracts
Federal health regulators gave hospitals and other funded providers one more year to make their websites and apps usable by people with disabilities. Since vendors build most of what patients touch online, the smartest use of that year is the contract file.
Week of 12 January 2026
Patient-directed AI: where HIPAA ends, a provider’s duties change shape
In January 2026, two major AI companies invited patients to connect their medical records. Nothing in the law changed, but providers’ duties changed shape: what they cannot block, what they still control, and what they owe patients who arrive with an AI’s answer.
Week of 28 July 2025
Why the CMS patient app pledge depends on the registration desk
In July 2025, more than 60 organizations promised patients their medical records in the apps they choose. The data pipes mostly existed. Whether it works for a real patient depends on the registration desk: proving identity, matching records, and handling consent and proxies.
Week of 19 May 2025
The scammers’ window: patient communication when a hospital goes dark
Within days of ransomware knocking Kettering Health offline in May 2025, criminals were phoning its patients for card payments. Talking to patients during an outage is a security control, and it has to be built before the attack.
Week of 28 October 2024
Telehealth’s three policy clocks all ran down in December, so virtual care needed an annual cycle
After the 2025 fee schedule, whether a Medicare patient could see a clinician by video still hinged on three separate authorities, CMS, Congress and the DEA, each with a clock running down in December. Virtual care needed to be run as a yearly cycle.
Week of 24 June 2024
How polyfill.io slipped past hospital tag reviews that checked each script only once
After 2022, hospitals built script reviews to stop patient data leaking out through tracking tags. Polyfill.io exposed the opposite risk: approved code that changed after approval and sent patients elsewhere. Managing it means checking the source, the content and the response.
Week of 10 July 2023
HCA’s data on 11 million patients sat in an email-formatting store, outside the EHR’s controls
HCA Healthcare’s 2023 breach came not from its clinical systems but from storage used to format patient emails. Outreach data looks harmless field by field, yet together it is protected health information and deserves the same care as the medical record.
Week of 27 February 2023
BetterHelp’s intake form was a privacy promise the ad stack broke
The FTC’s BetterHelp case involved a company outside HIPAA, yet it reached every health organization with a website or app. What patients are told at sign-up is a promise, and the tracking tools behind the page must be built to keep it.
Week of 11 April 2022
Ninety days at a time: telehealth’s stack of temporary permissions
In April 2022, another 90-day renewal of the public health emergency kept telehealth running on borrowed time. Patients saw one service. Underneath, health systems had to manage separate permissions with different owners and end dates, and tell patients which one their visit relied on.
Week of 27 December 2021
Why good-faith estimates weighed most on the therapist’s office
From January 1, 2022, every state-licensed provider owed uninsured and self-pay patients a written price estimate before scheduled care. Hospitals had billing teams to absorb it. Therapists and small practices, where self-pay is common and treatment has no fixed end, mostly did not.
Week of 12 July 2021
A permanent telehealth benefit with an in-person clock attached
Medicare’s July 2021 proposal made home telehealth for mental health the first permanent post-pandemic benefit. Its conditions turned continuity of care into a record-keeping task: where the patient is, how the visit happens, and when they were last seen in person.
Week of 21 December 2020
How the No Surprises Act turned a medical bill into four data handoffs
Written to protect patients from shock medical bills, the No Surprises Act made a patient’s financial experience depend on four handoffs of information between schedulers, billing systems, health plans and an arbitration portal, and on whoever owned each one.
Week of 7 December 2020
Patient access is won or lost at the records counter
HHS’s December 2020 plan to speed up patients’ access to their own records stalled. It still pinpointed where access breaks down: the response clock, the identity check and the delivery path. All three are operational, and none needed a final rule to fix.
Week of 27 April 2020
For many Medicare patients, telehealth meant a phone call
Pandemic telehealth is remembered as video. For many older, rural and low-income Medicare patients it was a phone call, and a CMS rule on April 30, 2020, paid for those calls like office visits. Health systems then had to run the phone properly.