Here at Healthcare Brew, we love a good rebrand—from Morning Brew’s own Tech Brew to Dunkin’ shedding the “Donuts.” Walgreens recently had a mini-rebrand of its own, grouping three of its subsidiaries together into a new business unit called US Healthcare.

Walgreens executives have said since 2021 that they want to transform into a “consumer-centric” healthcare company rather than exist as a mere chain of pharmacies. The US Healthcare unit, formed in October 2022, expands the company’s reach into primary care, post-acute care, and specialty pharmacy. The move opens the company up to a much larger profit pool—$135 billion to be exact, according to John Driscoll, who was tapped to lead the unit, up from $41 billion today.

“I think that healthcare is an epic fail in terms of consumer centricity with regard to convenience, price, and in some ways, connection,” Driscoll told Healthcare Brew.

A ‘drastic difference’ for Walgreens: Walgreens has spent roughly $13 billion to build the unit, which comprises VillageMD, Shields Health Solutions, and CareCentrix—all of which Walgreens acquired in 2021 and 2022.

VillageMD is a primary care clinic operator that’s rolling out centers attached to Walgreens pharmacies. Walgreens spent $5.2 billion in 2021 to buy a majority stake in VillageMD because of the provider’s experience with value-based care; Walgreens executives said they anticipate opening 1,000 Village Medical at Walgreens clinics by 2027. It’s an “aggressive” goal, John Ransom, a healthcare analyst at investment bank Raymond James, wrote in an analyst note on Nov. 22, 2022.

VillageMD also acquired Summit Health-CityMD, another primary care clinic operator, in January 2023 for $8.9 billion—$3.5 billion of which came from Walgreens—giving it a 53% stake in the combined company. Keep reading here.—MA

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email Maia at [email protected]. For completely confidential conversations, ask Maia for her number on Signal.

Three years after the CDC announced the first Covid-19 case in the US, continuous Medicaid coverage—one of the final vestiges of pandemic-era life—is set to go the way of masks, social distancing, and the national obsession with sourdough starter.

Beginning April 1, states can once again cut off individuals who are no longer eligible for Medicaid coverage, which is something the federal government has barred since March 2020.

As many as 14 million people could lose Medicaid coverage when the continuous enrollment provision ends, according to estimates from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The policy change could have major financial implications for states and the insurers they partner with to provide Medicaid coverage.

“We’re going to have the biggest disenrollment from Medicaid in the history of the program. That’s going to be something that potentially is going to be really challenging for beneficiaries to navigate,” said Jamie Daw, an assistant professor of health policy and management at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. “A lot of people who study Medicaid are really watching closely to see how the states actually implement the unwinding and how they go about disenrolling people.”

How we got here: The Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which was signed into law in March 2020, allowed states to get an increased Medicaid reimbursement, known as the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP), if they agreed to not kick residents off the joint state-federal health insurance program for the duration of the public health emergency.

Medicaid enrollment ballooned under the provision because people who normally would have been ineligible due to changes in income, the end of a pregnancy, or other reasons continued to receive coverage. More than 84.4 million people were enrolled in Medicaid as of October 2022—up from the 64 million enrollees as of January 2020, according to the latest available federal data. Keep reading here.—SY

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email Shannon at [email protected]. For completely confidential conversations, ask Shannon for her number on Signal.

A hospital often brings in suppliers: maybe a pharmacy service that handles electronic medical records, or a CT-scanning technology to inspect a broken bone. But ransomware actors target third-party imaging vendors and electronic medical records systems—meaning any third-party risk can become a first-party risk, which is no party at all.

Healthcare CISOs and industry leaders have formed the Health3PT initiative, which aims to collect best practices to address security responsibilities along the supply chain. An agreed-upon framework, its members hope, will support buyers, suppliers, and security professionals as the line blurs between a hospital environment and their partners’ environments.

“You can’t help but care about what those risks are that your partners could potentially introduce. Their hygiene is now your hygiene,” said Omar Sangurima, principal technical program manager at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Sangurima is one of many industry leaders who will be on a number of Zoom calls this year to determine the Health3PT guidelines for third-party suppliers. The best practices will largely be pulled from the HITRUST Common Security Framework (CSF), a set of risk controls that include practices like management responsibilities, segregation in networks, and user access rights.

Health3PT plans to publish its “research on third-party risk metrics” in Q1 of 2023.

WannaCollaborate? When WannaCry ransomware hit hospitals in 2017, the attack froze a range of Windows-based technologies, from workstations all the way down to unpatched, connected MRI devices.

A new hospital product may lead to questions of responsibility, ones that the initiative aims to resolve. For example: Who, exactly, is responsible for updating the operating system? Keep reading here.—BH

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