IHA Daily Briefing: November 12

New IHA Strategic Partner: AblePay Health Solution for Predictable Reimbursement

To address the financial pressures facing patients and hospitals alike, new IHA Strategic Partner AblePay Health partners with hospitals, health systems and medical practices nationwide to improve patient payment outcomes. The company, founded in 2016 by a former hospital CFO, focuses on improving collections on patient balances while giving patients greater financial flexibility, clarity and support.

AblePay Health's patient financial engagement solutions reduce hospital collection costs and accelerate provider revenue for greater financial stability, with seamless integration into existing hospital revenue cycle operations. Here's how the process works:

• Following primary insurance adjudication, AblePay functions as a secondary payer for participating members.
• Hospitals receive payment at a guaranteed contractual rate within 14 business days.
• AblePay then manages the member's payment and assumes the risk of nonpayment, without recourse to the provider.

The program uses established 837, 835, and ACH healthcare payment processes, helping hospitals improve cash flow and reduce long-term collection exposure without requiring significant changes to existing systems and workflows.

AblePay Health serves patients and healthcare providers across 31 states, supporting both individual and employer-sponsored enrollment models.

Staff contact: Patrick Sonin

CMS Proposes Changes to Reduce Regulatory Burden

On Nov. 10, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) published proposed changes to certain hospital requirements, including Medicare and Medicaid conditions of participation. The goals of these proposed changes are to reduce regulatory burden, increase transparency, streamline existing standards, and afford greater flexibility to providers. The proposed rule also includes new requirements for hospitals and critical access hospitals related to the collection and disposition of birth tissues and standards for informed consent, and policies and procedures to support families requesting birth tissues. The rule also proposes implementation of new statutory requirements to allow critical access hospitals that meet certain statutorily defined criteria to be exempt from the distance eligibility requirements.

A CMS fact sheet with more information is available here.

Staff contact: Cassie Yarbrough

Cybersecurity Alert: Patch SailPoint IdentityIQ Vulnerability Immediately

The American Hospital Association (AHA) issued a cybersecurity advisory yesterday urging the immediate patch of a critical vulnerability in SailPoint IdentityIQ (IIQ), which has been found to have allowed remote access to a healthcare target. The identified vulnerability impacts all versions of IdentityIQ and allows an unauthenticated user remote code execution on the IdentityIQ server. As a result, it has received a Common Vulnerability Scoring System rating of 9.6, identified as "critical" by the National Vulnerability Database.

IIQ is an identity and access management tool that provides a single point of control for identity management and permissions for users across an entire enterprise. By connecting to various systems, IIQ can be operated as a single system to control a user's identities and access multiple applications across an organization, providing broad access to networks and potentially sensitive data.

It is strongly recommended that the identified patch be implemented immediately. SailPoint has released resolution information for each impacted and supported version of IdentityIQ, and said future patch levels will include the fixes once they become available.

Illinois Respiratory Disease Surveillance Data

The Infectious Respiratory Disease Surveillance Dashboard from the Illinois Dept. of Public Health (IDPH) provides the latest data on hospital visits, seasonal trends, lab test positivity and demographic data. IDPH also tracks COVID-19, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus information through the Illinois Wastewater Surveillance System dashboard.

Briefly Noted

The American Cancer Society (ACS) is recommending that most men ages 50-69 get screened for prostate cancer every other year according to new guidelines published Thursday in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. The new guidelines recommends those at higher risk, which include Black men and those with a close-family history of prostate cancer, should get the prostate-specific antigen blood test on an annual basis. The ACS said that men ages 70-74 should discuss with healthcare providers whether the PSA test makes sense for them.

Leading the News