Partners goes down (and then back up)

With help from Arthur Allen (@arthurallen202) and Mohana Ravindranath (@ravindranize)

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PARTNERS GOES DOWN (AND THEN BACK UP): Partners HealthCare, the Boston-based health care system, had a brief scare Wednesday when it had to take down its EHR systems for a short time. A system spokesman attributed the incident to unnamed technical issues, said they had been addressed, and specifically downplayed the possibility of an outside attack on the software.

Some Partners docs made light of the situation, with one tweeting: “If everyone hates electronic medical records so much, why does everyone cheer when downtime is over?”

ASSOCIATIONS CALL FOR PATIENT ACCESS OVERHAUL: Add the informatics associations to the list of groups jockeying to redefine patient and consumer control over their data in the coming years. Policy is ripe for a rethink: the administration is emphasizing patient access and control at every opportunity, and Congress is considering comprehensive privacy legislation in the wake of the big tech scandals.

Enter the American Medical Informatics Association and American Health Information Management Association. The groups are calling for a battery of policy changes, ranging from legislation (changing HIPAA) to administrative (promoting OpenNotes through Medicare payment nudges), aimed at making patients’ data more available and controllable.

That doesn’t apply just to data in patients’ electronic records, they said at a Wednesday event in the Capitol; it also means accessing and controlling data flow in apps and social media.

Ultimately, patients are an “army of fact checkers” — but need to have clear access in the first place; many patients don’t realize which specific data is covered by HIPAA and which isn’t.

And that information can sometimes be grossly in error, noted Rita Bowen, vice president of compliance and health information management policy at medical records management firm MRO. Bowen recounted one doctor’s visit in which her mother was asked about her diabetes — a condition she doesn’t have. It turned out the clinician had retrieved the wrong record entirely.

eHealth tweet of the day: Jay Parkinson MD, MPH @jayparkinson “I gave Grand Rounds this morning at The Brooklyn Hospital and talked about my typical “there’s a new way to communicate and manage health conditions!” and the residents’ pagers were beeping like mad drowning out anything decent and reasonable I had to say.”

THURSDAY: What’s the best Christmas gift you’ve ever given? Provide stories at [email protected]. Discuss gifts publicly at @ravindranize, @arthurallen202, @dariustahir, @POLITICOPro, @Morning_eHealth.

THE BUSINESS: Several stories burst into the news Wednesday:

— Apple sleep monitor?: Apple might be getting into the sleep monitoring business, a filing with the Federal Communications Commission suggests. The filing, spotted by Venture Beat, is for a company-branded sleep monitor; Apple previously bought a Finnish sleep tracker manufacturer.

— Nurx expanding business: Nurx, the startup offering birth control and other reproductive health services via telemedicine, is now offering an at-home HPV testing kit, TechCrunch writes. (We recently did a Q&A with company CEO Hans Gangeskar.)

— Does price transparency help?: A new brief from Surescripts, the information network helping handle e-prescriptions, says that the company’s real-time prescription benefit tool saves money for patients. The tool, used by clinicians when they prescribe drugs, allows prescribers to check whether there’s a comparable but cheaper therapy available; the brief says that’s the case about a quarter of the time.

The brief is of more than business interest; in the most recent Medicare Part D rule, CMS proposed requiring plans to make such a tool available to physicians.

— AI update: An academic bioethics center is out with a report today calling for immediate attention to the threats associated with artificial intelligence, including in health care.

The Hastings Center’s report calls for an international congress to consider regulation of AI and urges universities to create “a cadre of polymaths and transdisciplinary scholars” with AI expertise so oversight of the technology’s uses isn’t captured by people whose values are oriented toward the technology rather than humans. The report also urges government and foundation funders to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the benefits and risks of introducing AI to the U.S. health care system, a priority area for AI investment. “Competition to capture new market share is intense, and deployment often precedes full consideration of consequences,” the report says, and the perspectives of patients and clinicians need to be taken into account.

A CHAT WITH SUSAN DENTZER: Our colleague Arthur Allen has a chat with Susan Dentzer, the CEO of the Network for Excellence in Health Innovation, to talk about the network’s new book. Dentzer calls for hospitals and health care systems to advocate more for quotidian improvements, like sidewalks in the community, and for universal broadband access. Pros can get the full readout here.

MISSOURI PDMP UPDATE: We’re back to the seemingly never-ending will-we-or-won’t-we drama over whether Missouri will establish a statewide prescription drug monitoring program. Holly Rehder, the chief legislative advocate for such a system, is re-introducing a bill for the upcoming session in 2019; the governor says he wants to see legislation passed.

CR PROBABLE: The government will likely keep chugging via continuing resolution under a stopgap spending bill, our colleagues Jennifer Scholtes and Sarah Ferris are reporting. It’s even possible, if politicians continue to spar over border wall funding, that the government will be funded by stopgap through the end of the fiscal year. Pros can get the rest here.

PERSONNEL NOTES: The eHealth Initiative elected seven new members to its board of directors; the new members hail from organizations ranging from Fitbit to PwC … Todd Stottlemyer, formerly an executive at Inova, is now the CEO at CNSI, a health IT provider … Research!America named Jennifer Luray, formerly of BD and Abbott, as a senior advisor.

A group of mostly Google executives write about ensuring fairness in machine learning in Annals of Internal Medicine.

Optum says its data and analytics tools are helping its consumers save money with their health savings accounts.

A Health Affairs blog post breaks down the characteristics of bundled payment participants.