The story of a consulting firm losing a laptop, risking the exposure of sensitive personal information, is all too common these days. But it's worse when the personal info is unencrypted and contains individual medical details.
And even worse when the losers were basically debt collectors, compiling the information for hospital clients. Their "checklists...included a 'frailty' evaluation, a 'complexity' score of patients' physical condition and a prediction of whether a person would be hospitalized," according to the Star Tribune and the Minnesota Attorney General, who is suing the company.
Two of the largest hospital systems in the Twin Cities had contracts with the company to "help cut costs and boost revenues." Attorney General Lori Swanson alleges the "company also violated state consumer fraud and deceptive trade practices statutes by concealing from patients the extent of its involvement in their health care..."
And what's the name of this fine example of corporate personhood?
Accretive Health Inc.
Is that not just about the most unattractive corporate neologism ever? Accretive. It sounds like a disease, which, it turns out, is appropriate.
Here's their logo:
I note that the logo makes the mistake of setting the long and awkward word "accretive" in all uppercase, my favorite, which makes it hard to recognize the letter shapes and figure out what the heck it says.
But that difficulty may be appropriate, since I'm sure it's hard to figure out what they do.
(And nice kerning between the L and T in HEALTH, by the way!)
2 comments:
The "results providers trust" part is less than stellar too -- minus a capital and punctuation, it looks like three nouns at first, at least to me.
If they threw a bullet between the words, it would almost work as a tagline even if they were nouns:
results • providers • trust
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