With help from Arthur Allen (@ArthurAllen202), and Aubree Eliza Weaver (@AubreeEWeaver)

CMS CREEPS TOWARD MORE HEALTH IT ADOPTION: The outpatient payment rule CMS released late Wednesday advances the chronic care management code, a boost for telehealth; and makes some noise about electronic submission of quality measures.

— In the chronic care management section of the rules, the agency clarified conditions under which a provider qualifies for monthly payment for managing chronic conditions from afar. Enumerating all of the conditions the agency tacks on would require infinite length and patience; the former quality can be found at the link above.

Most importantly, the agency states that hospitals and providers must have “established relationships” with the patient (in-person treatment in the last twelve months) and must give “enhanced opportunities” for patient or caregiver to contact the provider.

— More speculatively, the agency is broadcasting its willingness to think about changing a rule starting in 2019: it will consider allowing hospitals to report the “median time from ED arrival to ED departure” electronically, rather than the previous “chart abstraction” (i.e. transcription) standard. And it’s “working diligently toward” the goal of accepting many other metrics electronically.

CURES STILL ON TRACK: In an announcement Wednesday, House Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy said the House is expected to take up 21st Century Cures this month. Everything’s going to plan, in essence.

eHealth tweet of the day: @ mayauppaluru 4% of modern genetic studies on non-European populations. Scientific community must address inclusivity #PMI @NIH ( http://bit.ly/1T7ZXwA)

Thursday morning: We’d like to wish you all a happy Eve of Fourth of July Eve. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to celebrate Fourth of July Eve with our newsletter — we’re taking a break. Hope you enjoy: watch the fireworks (maybe not your smartphones.) Send us missives at [email protected] or on Twitter @ arthurallen202, @ dariustahir, and @ Morning_eHealth.

PATIENTS LOSING PATIENCE: Yesterday saw an interesting discussion at the National Institutes of Health regarding patient engagement in clinical trials, focusing on how to better recruit, keep and communicate with the patients who we’d like to see join clinical trials.

Presenter Al Richmond of the Community-Campus Partnerships for Health said researchers must do a better job getting underrepresented minority patients into research. He suggested recruiting African-American patients through the National Medical Association, which represents African-American doctors.

Some other advice came from Matt Might, whom readers might remember from Seth Mnookin’s excellent New Yorker profile. Might’s son, Bertrand, has a rare genetic disorder; his father discovered the problem by putting his son’s genetic information on his blog and allowing crowdsourcing to do its magic. That’s not a scalable solution, he conceded.

He’s a self-described “extremist,” which allows him to “have simple answers to complex questions.” For example: “It’s time to rewrite HIPAA. Privacy can help patients, but it can also kill them.” Health IT Now’s Joel White, who attended the session, agreed: “I am calling for a HIPAA rewrite,” he said later.

FROM HERO OF THE SIEGE TO EHR SALVAGER: Ognjen Gajic, a Mayo Clinic doctor, has lived a varied life: a musician with an avant-garde rock band in Sarajevo; a doctor who stitched together victims of war during the ethnic strife in the Balkans; and now, a physician trying to cure what ails Mayo’s EHR.

Mayo’s software — like many nationwide — overloads its users with information. Gajic is using a simple graphical interface to convey information at a glance, through icons rather than text. It seems to be successful, although integrating it with Mayo’s new EHR system, Epic, may be a challenge. Pros can get Arthur Allen’s full story here: http://politico.pro/1T7ZY3z

CALLS FOR A UNIQUE IDENTIFIER AREN’T UNIQUE ANYMORE: CHIME sounds off on the need for a unique patient identifier in a letter to Sen. Lamar Alexander and the rest of the Senate HELP Committee. This marks, by our reckoning, the second straight day with prominent figures calling for such a number. (Two days ago, Stanford doc and Health IT Policy Committee leader Paul Tang was the voice calling out.)

MODERN TIMES: One NIH panel was so full of patient advocates that, well, “none of us are tweeting now,” said Sharon Terry, of the Genetics Alliance; everyone who would tweet about it, apparently, was on the panel. If no one tweets it, does it really occur?

FOLLOW THE BOUNCING BALL: Teladoc had a strong initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday. The company debuted at $19 per share and closed at $28.05, giving it a market capitalization of $1.02 billion.

Some Wall Street analysts think the stock could go even higher. RBC Capital analyst David Francis is targeting $35 per share, with $50 as a best-case scenario. That’s based on 2016 revenue projections of $130 million, which would be roughly triple its $43.5 million haul in 2014.

VA STEPPING UP CYBERSECURITY: The Office of Personnel Management breach is being taken as a teaching moment by the V.A., the agency’s CIO Stephen Warren said yesterday. The agency is implementing multi-factor authentication — a user, when signing on, must verify identity with multiple pieces of data — and is thinking philosophically.

The IT staff had a meeting June 9 with its partners on additional controls. “It’s not just about locking things down; it’s how do you lock things down while fulfilling our mission to veterans,” Warren said.

It’s been an eventful time for Warren. He announced he’s stepping down as CIO on Monday; he’ll be replaced by Laverne Council. (He’ll still be the principal deputy assistant secretary for IT.) Also, OPM informed him his records were pilfered in the breach.

MORE ON COUNCIL, THE NEW VA CIO: Laverne Council, a former private sector IT consultant, moves into the job Monday, following Senate confirmation last week. Warren, who has been filling in the past 2 ½ years, will relinquish the job and essentially revert to being chief operating officer of the $4 billion, 8,000-person VA IT department. Warren was brought to the VA eight years ago to help consolidate its IT system.

McKINSEY: INTERNET OF THINGS WORTH $$$ FOR HEALTHCARE: Consultancy McKinsey believes that the Internet of Things is an awfully big deal in healthcare. It estimates the value of the sector at $170 billion to $1.6 trillion globally in 2025.

Value from Internet of Things-enabled devices will come from two pathways, the report authors predict: helping patients manage chronic disease, and helping healthy humans keep well. For the former, the report projects 10-15% savings on cost of care, as a result of avoiding exacerbations to diseases like COPD, or increasing medication adherence.

But the healthcare system will need to continue its transition to rewarding value, not volume, of care, the authors say. And the devices will need to be … what’s that word again … ah, yes, interoperable.

EHRs CAN HELP PREDICT FALL RISK: A paper in July’s Journal of the American Informatics Association finds that using electronic medical record data can better predict fall risk for nursing home residents. EHRs tend to have more data than the systems nursing homes use: they contain more detailed medication information, which can inform the predictive models that help focus attention for caregivers.

The increased data allows algorithms to make better predictions about who’s at risk of falling. Both the simple algorithms and the EHR-enhanced algorithms split patients into tiers, and the EHR algorithms perform much better: 32.3% of falls occur among patients in the riskiest tier, as compared to approximately 19% of falls in the simple algorithm. There were some gaps in the study: risk factor data was missing for more than a third of the residents, and prescription drug data was also weak. Gathering that data might make for more targeted predictions.

WHAT WE’RE CLICKING:

ICYMI: Goldman Sachs says a digital healthcare revolution is coming — and it could save America $300 billion ( http://read.bi/1gcfzkI)

Don’t fear the future of medicine (Eric Topol interview): ( http://wb.md/1LysA3Q)

Improving patient safety incident reporting? There’s an app for that ( http://bit.ly/1f48fap)

Novartis launches smartwatch navigation app for the visually impaired ( http://bit.ly/1CaiXGB)

On China’s gene-editing research program ( http://nyti.ms/1GPLZrt)

It’s time to modernize the HIPAA privacy rule ( http://bit.ly/1RTiDh7)

What our tweets and Google searches say about our health ( http://bzfd.it/1CMf9WM)