Cyber-themed telehealth bill on the horizon

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

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Quick Fix

Virtual care dominated the health tech news cycle this week, and today we’ll be watching as ONC hosts a one day event on patient matching for PDMPs. Here’s what we’ve got:

— Cyber-themed telehealth bill on the horizon: Rep. Robin Kelly says rural hospitals need to shore up their cyber protections before widely adopting telemedicine.

— Planned Parenthood app ramps up to fight Trump administration restrictions: Planned Parenthood Direct — a free mobile app patients can use to schedule appointments or order medication — could help the nonprofit reach more patients, despite policymakers’ efforts to curb reproductive health access, leaders say.

— Experts say HIEs were ready to weather Dorian: Health information exchanges in the southeast were better prepared for the hurricane than they’ve ever been.

eHealth tweet of the day, from this thread: Niall Brennan, @N_Brennan, “2/4 I will probably get kicked out of the cool kids data club (assuming I was ever in it) but I’m having a harder and harder time squaring big techs utter disdain for our individual privacy with the push to make it as seamless as possible for patients to download and share data”

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Driving the Day

CYBERSECURITY FIRST, TELEHEALTH LATER — Kelly is working on a bill that would fund rural hospitals and health care systems to enhance their cybersecurity before the “full-blown telemedicine revolution,” she said at the Illinois Telehealth and Policy Forum this week. Kelly’s office is still working out the details, but staffers are committed to the idea that helping health care providers overcome cybersecurity fears is the first step in getting them to embrace virtual care, a staffer told Morning eHealth.

Cybersecurity is a “big, scary world to many of us,” including to Kelly, she said — even though she previously served as ranking member on the House Oversight IT subcommittee. “If it’s scary to us, imagine what it must sound like to a rural hospital administrator who has little or no technical computer training. To them, it’s yet another thing to add to their already impossible To-Do list.”

50 STATES WILL HAVE PLANNED PARENTHOOD APP BY 2020 — Planned Parenthood is now offering its free telehealth app to patients in 27 states and D.C., part of its effort to resist what leaders see as the Trump administration’s efforts to curb access to reproductive rights.

Planned Parenthood Direct lets patients order birth control to their homes, make appointments and learn about contraception. The nonprofit announced the expansion of the app — which evolved from two smaller pilot projects — this week. The organization plans to roll it out in all 50 states by 2020.

It’s one of many digital health services the nonprofit has been offering. As we’ve reported, some Planned Parenthood clinics have for years allowed patients to video chat with abortion providers in other locations to get prescriptions for abortion medication.

...The organization has faced financial challenges, especially after withdrawing from the Title X federal family planning program following a new rule that prevents recipients from referring patients for abortion. That move cost Planned Parenthood $60 million in annual funding.

Though some patients will pay visit fees for Planned Parenthood Direct, the exact amount varies depending on the state and it’s not enough to make up for the loss of Title X funding, a spokesperson told Morning eHealth.

AMA APPROVES NEW CPT CODES FOR 2020 — The American Medical Association has approved eight new Current Procedural Terminology codes for 2020, allowing providers to describe more telehealth and remote patient monitoring activity, Pro’s Darius Tahir reports.

WILL VA DELAY CERNER IMPLEMENTATION — OR NOT? More sources have confirmed our recent story that the VA plans to partially delay rolling out the Cerner EHR in the Pacific Northwest, but a VA spokesperson said no announcement is imminent. And we’re told that Secretary Robert Wilkie, who wrote last month that the rollout was starting as planned by next April, isn’t eager to retreat.

The latest plan, according to two well-placed sources, is to start the rollout in late March at the Level 3 Mann-Grandstaff Medical Center in Spokane, Wash., while holding off implementation at two Puget Sound-area installations until October. Implementation leaders have told their staff this plan, we’ve been told, but it isn’t in writing. Problems related to imaging software — not as crucial in Spokane, which offers limited specialty care — are holding up progress in the larger Seattle-area installations, two sources said.

HIES ARE UP AND RUNNING IN THE STORM — HIEs in the southeast were better prepared for Hurricane Dorian than they’ve ever been, two of their leaders tell Pro’s Arthur Allen. By Wednesday, when Dorian began its creep toward the U.S., the Georgia Regional Academic Community HIE had tested all its connections with hospitals and providers in Savannah and other coastal areas. They had set up emergency portal access for emergency medical clinicians who might see patients in shelters in churches or gyms, said Tara Cramer, the exchange’s executive director.

… North Carolina’s state-run HIE had set up connectivity during last year’s Hurricane Florence to HIEs in Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee, enabling them to locate records for patients who turn up in North Carolina facilities and to include any treatment records in the network for when the patients get back home, said Christie Burris, the exchange’s executive director. The two Carolina HIEs exchanged thousands records over the past year, she said.

RENEWED PUSH TO GET AN NATIONAL ID — More than 50 health care organizations and companies have urged Senate appropriators to follow the House’s move to strip the 20-year-old rider prohibiting HHS from adopting a national unique patient identifier in a fiscal 2020 spending package. In a letter sent last week, the groups say the lack of an identifier has stifled innovation and poses serious patient safety risks that cost the average health care facility $17.4 million a year in denied claims and potential lost revenue.

Health IT Business Watch

ANDROID USERS CHALLENGE APPLE HEALTH — The University of California, San Francisco is leading a project to create an open-source system allowing Android phone users to access their health records the way many iPhone users can with Apple’s health record viewing system, collaborators announced this week. Cornell Tech, Sage Bionetworks, Open mHealth and The Commons Project will work together on the new “CommonHealth” venture, and participants will be vetting apps to ensure they’re safe.

CERNER COMMENCES LAYOFFS — The Kansas City-based EHR giant is laying off about 255 employees, about half of which will be from the Kansas City offices, the Kansas City Business Journal reports. Those cuts are intended to cut costs and raise operating margins.

WHAT HAPPENS TO CENTRICITY AFTER THE ATHENAHEALTH MERGER? That’s the question some customers of the GE Healthcare’s EHR system had after athenahealth’s acquisition by Veritas Capital and Elliott Management earlier this year. As part of that deal, Athenahealth, snapped up by for about $5.7 billion, is combining its products with Virence property Centricity’s. Veritas owns Virence Health, formerly GE Healthcare’s value-based care business.

The new combined entity, named and branded as athenahealth, is “committed to supporting our Centricity solutions” and is investing in new resources to provide a “single point of contact for each of our Centricity customers,” a spokesperson told Morning eHealth.

NAMES IN THE NEWS —HHS leaders are planning to name Brad Smith the next director of the CMS innovation center, our colleague Dan Diamond reports. Smith was most recently CEO of Aspire Health, a palliative care provider he co-founded with former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.

What We're Reading

— The University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing’s Theresa Brown describes EHR and bar code woes in her assertion in The New York Times that the American health care system is a giant workaround.

— CVS won’t stock uBiome’s kits in its stores, Zachary Tracer and Erin Brodwin write for Business Insider.