CommonWell-Carequality connection

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

HOW THE COMMONWELL-CAREQUALITY LINKUP IS REALLY GOING: The CommonWell Alliance’s health information sharing efforts are being thwarted by low participation from providers, a new KLAS report says, but that could all change when CommonWell links up to the competing sharing network, Carequality--a plan the two groups announced in 2016.

At present, Carequality has an advantage because its two most active vendor members, Epic and athenahealth, make their customers’ patient records available automatically to other Epic and athena users, as well as to clients of other vendors within Carequality. Commonwell’s largest vendor-member, Cerner, makes CommonWell available to users who request it. And not enough are requesting it, according to KLAS.

“There isn’t a lot of value derived from Commonwell,” Coray Tate, one of the report’s authors, tells Morning eHealth’s Arthur Allen. “Its adoption is so spread out through the country that the likelihood of having someone near you to exchange with is small.”

Cerner declined to comment on the report. CommonWell director Jitin Asnaani tells Morning eHealth that the KLAS report “is slanted,” and suggests taking it “with a grain of salt. The kernel of truth is that as our users go live, each individual provider makes the whole network more valuable.”

The linkage of CommonWell and Carequality could enable more than 90 percent of U.S. hospitals and more than 60 percent of doctors’ offices to share information through one central exchange. CommonWell has begun piloting its connection to Carequality and expects to make the connection generally available in the early summer. The full story, for Pros, here.

DATA BREACH AT FEDERAL WORKERS’ HEALTH PLAN: A health plan for federal employees has accidentally revealed Social Security numbers and sent them to the wrong subscribers. The breach affected about 14,000 customers and dependents.

The SAMBA Health Benefit Plan listed names and Social Security numbers of the wrong dependents in a routine mailing, our colleague Dan Diamond reports. It has reported the breach to the Office of Personnel Management and purchased identity protection for all customers.

Walter Wilson, SAMBA’s executive director, cites two mistakes that compounded each other: First a SAMBA contractor used the wrong template, which revealed Social Security numbers that were supposed to be hidden, and SAMBA then mismatched family members. “We are embarrassed to no end,” Wilson said.

More for Pros here.


GOTTLIEB CALLS FOR NATIONAL OPIOID PRESCRIBING SYSTEM: At a Chamber of Commerce event Thursday, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb proposed a national electronic prescribing platform that he said could combat the opioid crisis, our colleague Sarah Karlin-Smith reports. Prescription drug monitoring programs are currently run by states that don’t always link up to each other; Gottlieb suggested creating one interoperable system. A bipartisan House bill, H.R. 3528 (115) would require e-prescribing of all controlled substances in Medicare Part D.

Gottlieb told POLITICO in an interview that the system could prompt doctors at the moment they’re writing a prescription to prevent co-prescribing dangerous combinations, though there would be “upfront costs” for building out that system. The full story, for Pros, here.

Not everyone thinks the idea is feasible. Danna Droz, a prescription monitoring program liaison for the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, tells Morning eHealth that “the concept is attractive but implementation is likely to be more expensive and take a lot longer than anyone expects. Moreover, there’s no guarantee that it will be better than the very good, albeit imperfect, network of interoperable PDMPs that we have today.”

Congress is already warming up to the idea of a national prescription data hub. As we reported earlier this week, Senate HELP Committee members rued the fact that not all state PDMPs are interoperable, and asked witnesses about the value of a federally-funded central database. Lobbying group Health IT Now has urged the FDA to issue a contract for a national hub that could cull state PDMP data instead of linking them all together. Its partner, the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs, represented the two groups at the White House Opioid summit Thursday.

UBER OFFICIALLY ENTERS THE MEDICAL MARKET: The ride-hailing giant announced yesterday that it’ll offer to transport patients to and from their appointments. It’s not the first to do that — Lyft and Circulation both do as well — but the number of competitors shows that tech companies are increasingly interested in offering their services as a way to reduce the number of appointments missed because of lack of transportation.

But as Morning eHealth’s Darius Tahir reports, it’s not clear if these services actually do reduce the no-show rate. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association-Internal Medicine found that rates of missed appointments among a group offered free rides to clinics didn’t differ greatly from the ones who weren’t. Still, Uber appears unfazed: “We’re getting feedback that [our product is] improving operations and efficiency,” said Jay Holley, an Uber Health official. “We feel confident that this works.”

A December 2016 HHS decision to waive anti-kickback regulations for the provision of free rides to patients has helped nurture this market. Some of Uber’s partners pay for the rides out of pocket but others seek reimbursement. Pros can read the rest of Darius’s story here.

eHealth Tweet of the day: Jake West @jakeonradio Surprised by this Uber health news. I took Uber to a quick procedure involving light anesthesia. Hospital refused to perform until I could line up a non-Uber ride home. Hospital cited safety concerns. https://www.axios.com/uber-health-care-rides-1519837608-c54a7f06-51dd-4e2f-8293-96f5645de3ad.html

And another, from our POLITICO colleague who was at the White House summit: Brianna Ehley @Briannaehley Kellyanne says the president has accepted all of the White House opioid commission’s recommendations... but how many have been implemented? (Not many.) #OpioidSummit

IT’S FRIDAY at Morning eHealth where your author is prepping for her first-ever trip to Las Vegas, a place Hunter S. Thompson novels have previously dissuaded her from visiting. She’s got a packed HIMSS schedule between panel discussions and interviews, but send suggestions to [email protected]. Or Tweet them to @ravindranize, @athurallen202, @DariusTahir, @POLITICOPro, @Morning_eHealth.

MACPAC COMMISSIONERS APPROVE 42 CFR PART 2 RECOMMENDATIONS: The Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission, known as MACPAC, yesterday recommended encouraging data-sharing for patients with substance abuse disorders and signaled an interest in changing privacy rules.

Generally, patient consent is required to share medical records related to substance abuse. In January, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration updated privacy rules within a law known as 42 CFR Part 2 to allow greater disclosure of patient data for payment and health care operations, but not for treatment.

MACPAC commissioners unanimously voted in favor of an analyst’s recommendations to seek further HHS guidance on data sharing, Morning eHealth’s Darius Tahir reports. The full story for Pros here.

SENATORS SEEK ANSWERS ON HEALTH CARE PRICE TRANSPARENCY: A bipartisan group of senators, led by Bill Cassidy, is collecting feedback from patients, providers and insurers about why price transparency is so limited in the health care market. Stakeholders have until March 23 to tell them.

Cassidy’s new working group, which includes Sens. Todd Young, Chuck Grassley, Michael Bennet, Tom Carper and Claire McCaskill, eventually plans to craft legislation that will make health care market pricing more transparent.

Their initial questions include: what information do consumers currently have about prices and out-of-pocket costs; who should ultimately be responsible for providing information to consumers; and how to ensure that transparency requirements don’t “place unnecessary or additional burdens on health care stakeholders.”

More for Pros here.

ONC’S HELP WITH USABILITY: Researchers from RTI International and the Medstar National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare on Thursday presented a near-final draft of a “usability change package.” It will be released soon on the ONC website for use by forlorn EHR users. “It’s essential to identify problems, make and test changes after implementing an EHR, which is when many usability problems surface,” said RTI’s Jonathan Wald. Usability problems won’t be going away soon. “EHRs change with every new release, and health care changes with the workflow demands on everybody who’s part of the system,” said Zach Hettinger of Medstar.

STUDY: WHAT INCENTIVIZES HOSPITALS TO SHARE INFO? A group of researchershave concluded that health information exchange is low -- hospitals send an electronic summary of care record for less than half of their patients. Their level of sharing varies depending on their EHR technology and incentives for sharing.

IN BOARD LEADERSHIP NEWS:

— Kalanick joins Kareo board: After being fired from Uber’s top spot (he still remains a director) the ridesharing company’s former CEO has joined the board of Kareo, which sells software for medical practices, Axios reports. Travis Kalanick was an angel investor in the company.

— Evolent Health CEO joins Syapse board: Frank Williams, formerly CEO and chairman of the Advisory Board Company, is joining the board of Syapse, a precision medicine company.

WHAT WE’RE CLICKING ON:

—Mental health AI platform Woebot gets $8 million

—How the internet complicates doctor-patient relations

—Novartis partners with Pear on prescription digital medicine

—The American Hospital Association’s issue briefings on electronic patient engagementand health information sharing for treatment