What NHS tells us about health IT

With help from Arthur Allen (@arthurallen202) and Darius Tahir (@dariustahir)

Editor’s Note: This edition of Morning eHealth is published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 10 a.m. POLITICO Pro eHealth subscribers hold exclusive early access to the newsletter each morning at 6 a.m. Learn more about POLITICO Pro’s comprehensive policy intelligence coverage, policy tools and services at politicopro.com.

Quick Fix

— What NHS tells us about health IT: Single payer doesn’t guarantee better data coordination, eHealth’s Arthur Allen reports from England.

— More on Klobuchar, Murkowski’s health data bill: Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) will work to ensure that federal privacy legislation doesn’t leave sensitive health information out, staffers say.

— Cerner Millennium won’t initially have all veterans’ data: VA officials shared that and key details on their massive EHR modernization project this week.

eHealth Tweetof the day, on letters of recommendation: Ben Davies MD (UroLuddite) @daviesbj: “When writing a LOR, you can not say ‘good student’ unless you hate the student

You must say ‘very good student’ OR you have created a sub-text of malevolence

The coded language in LOR is ridic

All students should be the best 5% you have ever seen. They must levitate across oceans while writing a NEJM manuscript whiles they prepare some lunch for the homeless”.

It’s FRIDAY at Morning eHealth. Your author has a question for New Yorkers: What’s a special baked treat she can bring from the city to a friend’s family in Long Island? Must be able to maintain its integrity on the LIRR. Sweets go to [email protected]. Tweets go to arthurallen202, @dariustahir, @ravindranize, @POLITICOPro and @Morning_eHealth.

Driving the Day

‘PRETTY FAR BEHIND US’ — Progressive Democrats supporting single-payer health systems often point to the National Health Service as a model. But, as eHealth’s Arthur Allen reports, NHS has long struggled to share health information seamlessly even between hospitals and general practitioners, despite several attempts to modernize (sound familiar?).

“There isn’t a shared record that the hospital and GP can look at,” said GP Sandra Oelbaum. While her own software works well, local hospitals can’t access it — so clinicians often cannot pull up records for patients who end up in the emergency room, Arthur writes.

“We have a health system that despite it being nationalized and you’d assume from the outside completely integrated, from the inside you can see it’s still a lot of IT elements strung together,” NHS England CEO Simon Stevens told U.S. reporters at a briefing earlier this year.

“As primitive as our health IT system is in the United States, my impression was they are pretty far behind us,” said Terry Fairbanks, founder of the National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare at MedStar Health in Washington, D.C.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR HEALTH DATA PRIVACY BILL? — Lawmakers aiming to protect the sensitive data consumers share outside the health system will be working to bundle it into comprehensive privacy legislation, a staffer for Klobuchar told Morning eHealth. Klobuchar and Murkowski recently introduced the Protecting Personal Health Data Act, which directs HHS to come up with privacy regulations for direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies, health tracking apps and other products or services that gather health information but aren’t subject to HIPAA.

The intent, says the staffer, is to force companies to adopt a standard consent process so consumers and patients fully understand how their sensitive data is being used and who can access it. Their effort takes on even more urgency as ONC and CMS refine their dual information blocking and interoperability rules, which could make it even easier for patients to send their health records and insurance claims information to outside apps. (As we’ve reported, some providers worry that some patients will be cavalier with their health data and — as many of us do with consumer apps — agree to privacy terms without giving them a thorough read.)

— Speaking of privacy, patient advocates are buzzing about the FTC’s $5 billion settlement against Facebook, which many say isn’t harsh enough. We’ll have more on what the settlement means for patients today — eHealth subscribers, stay tuned.

LIMITED DATA, SLOWDOWNS EXPECTED FOR CERNER ROLLOUT — Not all veteran patient data will be accessible in the Cerner Millennium system when it goes live in three Pacific Northwest facilities next year, officials said during a House Veterans’ Affairs subcommittee hearing this week. The VA is also hiring itinerant nursing staff to handle expected care slowdowns, Arthur reports.

Lawmakers were concerned about a GAO report concluding that the VA doesn’t have good cost estimates for updating 130 versions of VistA, its homegrown EHR system. Though VA officials have estimated that it will cost about $4.9 billion to maintain VistA during the 10-year transition to Cerner, “I don’t think we have any confidence in that $4.9 billion figure, and that gives me less confidence in the $10 billion estimate for Cerner,” technology modernization subcommittee Chairwoman Susie Lee (D-Nev.) said.

— Jim Banks, the subcommittee’s ranking member, grilled John Short, the Cerner project’s chief technology officer, about the Federal EHR Modernization Office, which the VA and DoD originally said would be up and running with permanent leadership on April 30. Three months later, the VA and DoD haven’t advertised for leadership of the office, which is supposed to have the final word on implementation decisions by the two agencies. Short said he didn’t know when the office would be functional.


Names in the News

ATA’S (NOT SO) NEW PRESIDENT — Joseph Kvedar is headed for his second stintas president of the American Telemedicine Association starting in April, succeeding Cerner’s John Glaser, ATA announced this week. Kvedar, who is vice president for connected health at Partners Healthcare, served as ATA president in 2004 and 2005. He was also on ATA’s board of directors from 2002 to 2006.

Kvedar returns as ATA prepares to ramp up its advocacy; as CEO Ann Mond Johnson told us in the spring,the group is planning internal hires to push for telemedicine-friendly federal and state legislation.

— In other virtual care news, Call9 founder Tim Peck — whom eHealth’s Darius Tahir interviewed earlier this month— plans to restart the nursing home-focused telemedicine company he said faltered because value-based care contracting hasn’t quite taken off. This time it’ll be called Call9 Medical, reports Crain’s New York.

— And in the association world, the American Hospital Association has tapped Providence St. Joseph Health CEO Rod Hochman as its chair starting in 2021, Modern Healthcare reports. He was elected by AHA’s board of trustees.

AMAZON EXEC DEFECTS TO ALIVECOR — Apple competitor AliveCor, which sells wearable heart monitors and apps, has hired away Amazon’s Priya Abani, who served as Amazon’s director of Alexa technology, CNBC reports.


What We're Reading

— Janae Sharp argues that the Protecting Personal Health Data Act needs appropriate enforcement to be effective in Inside Digital Health.

— Livongo and Health Catalyst had especially strong IPO debuts, WSJ’s Maureen Farrell and Melanie Evans report.