The MBTA shuttles over a million passengers a day around Greater…

State officials knew that development of a federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) website was off track for more than a year before the October 1, 2013 launch date.  Instead of raising concerns about the project, they misled the public by minimizing the shortcomings of the contractor hired to build the website, asked state workers to approve shoddy work and appear to have covered up the project’s abysmal progress in a presentation to federal officials.

This paper will discuss the importance of secure medical records in health information exchanges (HIEs), the general history of EHRs in the US and in Massachusetts particularly, the history of privacy rights in the medical field, and finally efforts being taken to ensure more protected and private EHRs.

This brief is part of an occasional series from Pioneer Institute examining the direct effects of the ACA on Massachusetts. Please see the end of the paper for more examples.

The Obama administration has done its best to highlight some of the more popular provisions of the law such as expanded preventative benefits, allowing children up to age 26 to remain on their parents insurance, closing the prescription drug “doughnut hole” for seniors on Medicare, and expanded contraception coverage. Yet, many of the less attractive provisions have not been given a local spotlight. This brief will examine the impact of the so-called “Cadillac tax” included in ObamaCare.

The importance of this work is especially clear as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) requires a health benefit exchange to be operating in every state by 2014. The question of the Connector's effectiveness is of critical importance to other states as they try to plan and design what an exchange will look like in their own state' For Massachusetts, the ACA provides both opportunities and challenges moving forward.

As an alternative to analyzing the reform’s impact on isolated issues, in January 2009 the Pioneer Institute proposed a framework for evaluating the reform.

Passed in 2006, the Massachusetts healthcare reform bill represents an innovative approach to healthcare reform in the United States. The bill (Chapter 58 of the Massachusetts Laws of 2006) has four main goals: to use an individual mandate to expand access to near universal levels; to establish guidelines for employers' fair share' contribution and involvement; to reorganize insurance markets and manage the distribution and subsidization of several insurance plans through the new Massachusetts "Connector"; and to establish transparency that will aid in understanding and assessing the bill's cost and quality of care.

Over the course of the past decade, thousands of organizations have used business process redesign and information technology to get to know their customers well, and they have used that information to do a better job of meeting their customers’ needs. Five years ago, anyone who had a checking account, a mortgage, an auto loan, and a credit card with the same financial institution might as well have been dealing with four different companies. Today, more often than not, that individual gets one statement each month that consolidates his or her entire relationship with that financial institution. The bank knows the extent of its relationship with each customer, and its customers can manage their accounts and loans in a unified, coordinated manner.