National emergency declaration boosts telehealth

With help from Darius Tahir (@dariustahir)

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Quick Fix

— National emergency declaration boosts telehealth: President Donald Trump touted virtual care when he declared a national emergency over the worsening coronavirus pandemic.

— More details on Google’s coronavirus site: Trump also said the tech giant was building a website as part of the response to the public health crisis, but the company downplayed the project.

— A call for health data donations: A German epidemiologist says you should give health authorities your data to help fight the virus’ spread.

eHealth tweet of the day: Steven Levy @StevenLevy “He may not write it for a couple of years, but I am ready to pre-order Dr. Fauci’s book right now.”

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Driving the Day

TELEHEATH: INCREDIBLE, PERHAPS, BUT NOT NEW — Telehealth advocates may have been surprised to hear Trump describe virtual care, which health care providers have used for more than a decade, as a “fairly new and incredible thing” on Friday. But they say his national emergency declaration could boost use of the technology, which could minimize patients’ exposure to coronavirus.

... The declaration lets HHS Secretary Alex Azar waive federal licensing requirements so out-of-state doctors can treat patients virtually in other states with great need, for instance. The $8.3 billion coronavirus emergency funding package Trump signed earlier this month also lets Azar waive restrictions on telehealth reimbursement. (Telehealth groups and lawmakers, including Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) have encouraged Azar to activate that authority.)

Over in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has also encouraged telehealth, our POLITICO colleague Bill Mahoney reports — and the state Department of Financial Services will be ordering insurers to waive copays for telemedicine.

“We are encouraging people to use telemedicine,” Cuomo said last week. “When the anxiety is high, people have some symptoms, they are anxious — is this coronavirus or is this just a flu, is this just a cold?

“We don’t want them to go to emergency rooms. Your emergency rooms back up. If you do have coronavirus, we don’t want you walking into emergency rooms and possibly infecting other people and staff, and if you don’t have coronavirus, we don’t want you to go to an emergency room where other people may have the coronavirus.”

Some telehealth companies are already seeing an uptick in business. Teladoc, for instance, has seen a 50 percent increase in visits over the previous week, and has fielded as many 15,000 requests in a day. The company has handled about 100,000 visits in the past week, according to a news release.

... Heartbeat Health, a tech company focused on cardiovascular health, raised $8.2 million in a funding round led by 406 Ventures and Optum Ventures, Optum’s venture fund and a part of UnitedHealth Group. CEO and founder Jeff Wessler told Morning eHealth the company has seen “huge uptake” among nursing facilities who want to remotely monitor elderly coronavirus patients’ heart health.

... Wessler said the outbreak could force lawmakers to permanently dial back reimbursement and licensing restrictions. “My gut tells me that once you can show that telemedicine has really helped curb covid, then it’ll be hard to walk it back,” he said. Covid-19 is what the WHO named the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Maybe a comeback for Call9? While the skilled nursing facility startup itself is in “hibernation,” CEO Tim Peck tells us, the recent reintroduction of the RUSH Act could make it easier to use telehealth for coronavirus treatment. “Telemedicine has a key role in differentiating who needs to be isolated versus who needs to be quarantined,” he said.

GOOGLE CAUGHT OFF-GUARD BY TRUMP’S ANNOUNCEMENT —Trump also mentioned at his Friday press conference that Google was building a website to aid the administration’s efforts to screen and test for coronavirus, but an arm of Google’s parent company quickly said the effort would initially be limited in scope, our POLITICO colleague Cristiano Lima reports.

... Some lawmakers immediately raised concerns about the privacy implications of the project. “It sounds like @Google just figured out how to get the personal health data of every single American,” tweeted Kyle Plotkin, chief of staff for Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), after Trump made the announcement.

Verily — a division of Alphabet, which also owns Google — is rolling out the site starting today. It’ll point Californians in the Bay Area to testing sites, our POLITICO colleague Steven Overly reports. Visitors to the site will fill out a survey determining if they’re eligible for a nasal swab test at a mobile testing site, and will be directed to a site if they’re available.

Speaking of testing sites, the Trump administration announced new ones over the weekend, Adam Cancryn reports.

... The so-called community-based testing sites represent a “new phase of testing,” HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir said, as the administration scrambles to increase test capacity and assuage fears that hospitals will be swamped by a crush of new cases.

USING DATA TO FIGHT CORONAVIRUS — One of Germany’s leading experts in digital epidemiology, an emerging field that analyzes data to understand how diseases spread, is calling for more data sharing, our POLITICO Europe colleague Janosch Delcker reports.

“Everyone has a cellphone that knows where you are, and some people even wear fitness trackers that, in principle, can detect a fever,” said Dirk Brockmann, a professor for complex systems who leads a project to model infectious diseases at the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s national disease control center.

“If there was infrastructure that allowed people to donate that data, we could analyze it to estimate when and where infected people come together with those who are susceptible, and more,” he added.

SCIENCE ADVISERS CALL FOR OPEN ACCESS ON CORONAVIRUS ARTICLES — Scientific journals should immediately make articles on coronavirus available to the public, the White House’s chief science and technology adviser, Kelvin Droegemeier, and his counterparts in 11 nations wrote last week in a call-to-action to major publishers, our Darius Tahir reports.

Journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine have already voluntarily opened access to their articles, and online repositories such as medRxiv have served as an open clearinghouse for preliminary studies.

EVENT CANCELLATIONS — In advance of CDC’s recommendation Sunday to cancel events involving more than 50 people, EHR giant Epic canceled its annual convention XGM 2020. Competitor Cerner has asked employees to work from home, according to a blog post.

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What We're Reading

— HealthcareITNews’ Mike Miliard reports on cybersecurity concerns about EHR snooping during the coronavirus outbreak.

— Apple says it’s vetting coronavirus related apps, per a news update from the company.