Administration officials under spotlight

With help from Adam Cancryn (@acancryn) and Mohana Ravindranath (@ravindranize)

Programming announcement: Our newsletters are evolving. Morning eHealth will continue to publish daily for POLITICO Pro subscribers, but starting on July 13th will consolidate to a weekly newsletter for all others. There will be no changes to the policy newsletters available to POLITICO Pro subscribers. To continue to receive Morning eHealth daily, as well as access POLITICO Pro’s full suite of policy tools and trackers,get in touch about a Pro subscription. Already a Pro subscriber?Learn more here.

Quick Fix

— Administration under spotlight: Top health officials get questions from quizzical Congress.

— HHS scores price transparency win: Health department’s signature price transparency rule gets federal judge’s OK.

— CMS released disparity data: CMS’s data on coronavirus shows wide racial disparities on burdens of the disease.

And more. But first, the jump.

eHealth tweet of the day: Ann-Marie O’Brien @StrongGirl51 “3 hours of EHR training , and you know how we get referrals? Fax Machine!”

WEDNESDAY: Your correspondent found this Onion headline – “Day Mockingly Beautiful” – grimly funny this week. Share Onion humor by email at [email protected]. Discuss laughs socially @dariustahir, @ravindranize, @POLITICOPro and @Morning_eHealth.

Driving the Day

ADMINISTRATION UNDER SPOTLIGHT— HHS officials leading the coronavirus response during House testimony Tuesday took an array of incoming questions, many focusing on tech and data questions, including a matter we’ve tracked for a while: getting data to Native American tribes and tribal epidemiolgists.

CDC Director Robert Redfield called the agency’s refusal to share Covid-19 data with tribal epidemiologists a “significant miscommunication” and vowed to ensure the nation’s 12 Tribal Epidemiology Centers get access to the information within the next couple weeks.

We reported earlier this month that the CDC had repeatedly rejected the tribal centers’ requests, even though they’re considered public health authorities on par with state departments that have had free access to the data.

While Redfield initially dismissed the issue as a miscommunication with a single tribal center, Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) said during a House Energy and Commerce hearing. But Lujan’s office independently confirmed POLITICO’s reporting that the CDC refused all 12 centers access to a range of datasets.

“You are right that there are still issues to be worked out,” Redfield said. “We’re committed to correcting that for all tribes.”

Redfield also offered a non-committal answer on whether the wave of contact tracing apps would significantly aid the virus response. “Clearly these new digital technologies that have been developed for contact tracing are important to be evaluated,” he said. However, he said “the most important component of contact tracing, we believe, is the human capacity” to perform the task.

Other matters Tuesday: officials pledgedthey wouldn’t cut corners on vaccine safety and said President Donald Trump hadn’t ordered a slowdown on testing, despite his recent claims otherwise. Infectious disease specialist Tony Fauci after Tuesday’s hearing said that the White House had ordered the cancellation of funding for a bat virus study.

— VA: Meanwhile, top Veterans Affairs officials testifying before the House VA Committee said the department, much like the rest of the health care, has a seen a telehealth boom. Telehealth visits have jumped 1,000 percent compared to same period last year, and there’s been 1.1 million telemental visits this year.

HHS WINS ON PRICE TRANSPARENCY RULE — A federal judge upheld the Trump administration price transparency mandate on hospitals Tuesday, dismissing First Amendment claims raised by providers.

Trump took a victory lap on Twitter Tuesday night, writing that it was a “BIG VICTORY for patients” and potentially “bigger than healthcare itself.”

The administration, like many conservatives, argues that price transparency is a needed tonic for health care costs – that patients will be able to shop around for favorable prices.

While there are all number of technical critiques of this argument – centering around the possibility that hospitals could use the data to coordinate price hikes – there’s another, more fundamental problem with the idea. There have been of price transparency startups and policies, and so far in practice, patients rarely use the information.

CMS DATA SHOWS WIDE RACIAL COVID DISPARITIES — Claims data released by CMS shows gaping racial disparities in the burden of coronavirus, our colleague Rachel Roubein reports: Black Medicare beneficiaries have been hospitalized four times more than white beneficiaries and have contracted the virus nearly three times as often. Hispanic and Asian beneficiaries were also more likely to become infected and hospitalized than white people.

The data release came after sustained outcry that the Trump administration was neglecting even providing basic information on the impact of coronavirus for people of color.

— CMS introduces new office: The agency also announced the new Office of Burden Reduction and Health Informatics, intending to continue CMS’s work on reducing provider reporting burden and increasing data-sharing.

GROUPS WANT LONGER EMERGENCY — The ever-louder chorus of groups pushing HHS head Alex Azar to extend pandemic telehealth flexibilities now includes the American College of Physicians, the American Medical Informatics Association, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, the Medical Group Management Association and Premier.

“The uncertainty surrounding whether the policy flexibilities enabled under the waivers will disappear is having a devastating impact already on our members and stoking fear,” the groups argued in a letter this week.

— Longer delays: In a separate letter to HHS, CHIME urged the department to delay enforcement for the interoperability and information blocking rules until 2023 or the end of the coronavirus public health emergency. And in yet another request, the group urged CMS to align any upcoming data requirements for the Inpatient Prospective Payment System with those two rules.

LES BLEUS OVER FRENCH CONTACT TRACING APP — Of the 1.9 million people who downloaded France’s contact tracing app, only 68 entered a positive Covid-19 test result and just 14 were notified of an at-risk encounter, a French official said Tuesday, our colleague Elisa Braun reports.

Part of the problem stems from the app design: the French went for a different, more centralized direction than others, who used the decentralized Google-Apple design. That means the two types of apps don’t communicate with each other.

“Personally, I regret that we don’t have interoperability with other European countries… but the health impact is limited: If you go on holiday in Spain, you can download the Spanish app,” the French official said.

Still, the problems are hardly unique to France. Throughout Europe and North America, apps have struggled to gain much traction among the population, with nations like Norway making the decision to simply withdraw their app. Even if the apps are popular, public health experts have said a sizeable majority of the citizenry must download the software in order for it to be effective.

Health IT Business Watch

CYBER WORKERS WORRY — Cybersecurity pros believe the threat of digital attacks will remain elevated throughout the pandemic and afterwards, according to a survey covered by our Cybersecurity colleague Eric Geller.

Only 15 percent of experts “believe that cyber operations and threat flow will return to normal” after the pandemic ends, the organizers of the Black Hat security conference said in their annual survey of past attendees. Eighty-four percent of respondents “believe that significant, lasting changes will occur, at least in some industries.”

Hospitals and other health care institutions have been targeted heavily during the pandemic, with authorities in Europe and the United States warning about the risk.

— Apropos of that… China’s diplomats are formally denying the European Union’s claims that the country is hacking European hospitals. Its representatives want the Union to provide evidence of its claims; the European Commission’s president has claimed to Xi Jinping that the continent has seen “cyberattacks in the past … on computing systems, on hospitals, and we know the origin of the cyberattacks.” But it’s declined to provide the source evidence behind its claims.

CERNER LAYOFFS — Cerner is laying off 100 employees, its third round of cuts in a year, the Kansas City Star reports. A company spokesperson says that the firm nevertheless plans on hiring 5,000 new employees by the end of the year; company leadership has spoken of a need to change its business focus.