Today: White House hosts Blue Button 2.0 expo

With help from Darius Tahir (@dariustahir)

TODAY — WHITE HOUSE HOSTS BLUE BUTTON 2.0 EXPO: The White House is opening its doors today to health IT-focused developers who want to incorporate Medicare claims data into mobile apps for patients and providers.

A senior White House official tells Morning eHealth that more than 500 groups have registered to build apps using the data, and that roughly 150 people are expected at today’s event: a “developers conference” modeled after Apple’s WWDC.

Blue Button 2.0, which lets patients download their own claims data, is a cornerstone of the White House and CMS health IT collaboration known as “MyHealtheData.” White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and CMS administrator Seema Verma announced their overall mission to increase patient access to data, as well as Blue Button 2.0, at HIMSS in March. MyHealtheData also aims to “provide more evidence-based treatment guidelines that ultimately will drive down costs and improve health outcomes,” Verma said in a statement.

Verma and Chris Liddell — the former Microsoft executive who now serves as the Deputy White House Chief of Staff for Policy Coordination — are slated to kick off the Blue Button 2.0 event. Other scheduled speakers include venture capital heavyweight John Doerr, and some groups will get a chance to demo their own apps, according to the senior official.

Federal officials plan to discuss with developers “data standards, interoperability ... how we’re thinking about API design,” the official said. It’s this administration’s first Blue Button 2.0 event, and if it’s successful there might be more — or federal agencies might be encouraged to host their own.

Liddell said in a statement that the conference demonstrated the Trump administration’s efforts to use “modern technology” to improve outcomes for patients.

WHAT CMS PROPOSAL MEANS FOR HEALTH IT: CMS’s lengthy Accountable Care Organization overhaul proposal won’t result in a “major reduction” in the documentation burden for clinicians, but is a step in the right direction, HIMSS’s senior director of federal and state affairs Jeff Coughlin tells Morning eHealth.

Last week CMS dropped a proposed rule to overhaul its Accountable Care Organization program, outlining simplified reporting requirements on EHR usage for ACOs and expanding coverage for telehealth.

Under the proposal, ACOs would report on the percentage of clinicians using certified EHRs instead of various other quality performance measures. It’s just “one less measure that providers have to worry about reporting,” Coughlin said.

Tom Leary — vice president for government relations at HIMSS — said the proposal “fits right in with what we had hoped the government would start doing.”

CMS also proposed to allow coverage for Next Generation Members of some asynchronous teleophthalmalogy and teledermatology services under the Telehealth Expansion Benefit Enhancement waiver. Some Medicare Shared Savings Program members could also get reimbursed for virtual services delivered outside non-rural and other shortage areas. The telehealth measures reflect “more of a willingness to use waivers to promote telehealth” at CMS, Coughlin said.

eHealth Tweet of the day: Hector Yee @eigenhector Remember when it was unfashionable to call anything a neural net? Now it’s unfashionable to have a paper that doesn’t call the object neural something or another :P. Is this going to cycle again or are we firmly in neural forever land? I don’t think AI winter is coming this time

Good MONDAY morning and welcome to Morning eHealth. For a respite from rain and snarled commutes this week, your author suggests the dark and dramatic new mini-series adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Ordeal by Innocence. News tips and your favorite Agatha Christie sleuth go to [email protected]. Reach the rest of the team at @arthurallen202, @dariustahir, @ravindranize, @POLITICOPro and @Morning_eHealth.

WHY A BAD HEALTH APP COULD GET GREAT REVIEWS: In a new articlein Nature’s npj Digital Medicine, researchers examine why a mobile app that inaccurately reports a patient’s blood pressure boasted high iTunes app store ratings.

The app, “Instant Blood Pressure” or “IBP,” took a measurement when the user put a finger over the flashlight and camera and held the microphone on his or her chest. The system often underreported elevated blood pressure, but participants whose IBP rating was higher than their estimated blood pressure reported enjoying the app less than those whose IBP estimates were similar to their own estimates.

It’s possible that “reassuring app results from an inaccurate BP-measuring app may have improved user experience, which may have led to more positive user reviews and greater sales,” the study states. “Systematic underreporting of elevated BPs may have been a contributor to the app’s success.”

THE TELLTALE HEART: Security researchers from cybersecurity firm McAfee were able to modify heart rate data displayed from a remote monitor and central monitoring station, they disclose in ablog post. The researchers were able to achieve the results with an unnamed central monitoring station and compatible monitor manufactured in 2004; according to the blog post, some of the hospitals they contacted use the systems. Hospitals can mitigate the problems by making sure their devices run on a separate, isolated network, among other solutions, they say.

The research is the product of a long line of hackers and tinkerers using security flaws to modify or encumber medical devices. Most famously, a band of short sellers and researchers prompted the recall of St. Jude cardiac devices.

ICYMI: FDA ALLOWS MARKETING OF DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER CONTRACEPTIVE APP: The Food and Drug Administration has allowed the creators of a mobile app to be marketed as a contraceptive method, the agency announced late last week. The app, “Natural Cycles”, calculates when a woman is likely to be fertile based on her daily body temperature and menstrual cycle.

The app could “provide an effective method of contraception if it’s used carefully and correctly,” Terri Cornelison, assistant director for the health of women in the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a news release. Still, “women should know that no form of contraception works perfectly, so an unplanned pregnancy could still result from correct usage of this device.”

...In other FDA news, the agency released draft guidance on accelerating certain early and mid-stage clinical trials for cancer drugs, our colleague Sarah Owermohle reports. The draft recommends assessing safety, a drug’s ability to fight cancer and other factors using multiple patient groups that would each be studied for specific objectives, which could merge elements of typical phase 1 and phase 2 trials. So-called expanded cohort trials could expedite drug development by seamlessly moving from initial findings like safe dosing levels to assessing typical phase 2 objectives, the FDA said.

PEOPLE IN THE NEWS: Gianrico Farrugia has been elected president and CEO of the Mayo Clinic, succeeding John Noseworthy after his retirement at the end of the year. Farrugia currently serves as the vice president of Mayo Clinic and CEO of Mayo Clinic in Florida. ...Cory Wiegert was named CEO of CancerLinQ, a subsidiary of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

WHAT WE’RE CLICKING ON:

—A New York Times opinionon the emotional gap between humans and machines

—A USA Today and Kaiser Health News report finding that surgery centers in 17 states don’t have to report deaths