Senators push for permanent telehealth changes

With help from Darius Tahir (@dariustahir)

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Quick Fix

— Lawmakers push for permanent telehealth changes: A bipartisan group of 30 senators urged leadership to cement temporary virtual care policies in a letter out today.

— Massive data gaps on pandemic’s impact on minorities: We may never fully know how coronavirus has affected African Americans and other minorities due to incomplete data on race and ethnicity.

— FDA’s pandemic policies open door to Apple tech: The Silicon Valley giant, already involved in states contact tracing efforts, is now digging deeper into patients’ digital health.

eHealth Onion headline of the day: The Onion @TheOnion “Coworkers On Zoom Trapped In Infinite Loop Of Telling Each Other ‘Oh Sorry, No, Go Ahead’https://bit.ly/2BbAhAP”

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Driving the Day

RE-UPPING CONNECT FOR HEALTH — Twenty-nine senators including Commerce Chair Roger Wicker, Mark Warner, Kyrsten Sinema, Lisa Murkowski, Lindsey Graham and Amy Klobuchar have co-signed a letter led by Brian Schatz urging Senate leaders to permanently implement the pandemic policies that have allowed for an unprecedented uptick in virtual visits.

Some of those temporary policies — including allowing HHS Secretary Alex Azar to waive telehealth restrictions during the Covid-19 emergency — were adopted from the CONNECT for Health Act, S. 2741, a sweeping bill that telehealth proponents have been pushing for years.

Making telehealth access permanent would “assure patients that their care will not be interrupted when the pandemic ends,” the letter reads. It could also signal to health care providers that “costs to prepare for and use telehealth would be a sound long-term investment.”

Elsewhere in Congress, Sens. Martha McSally and Doug Jones — who both co-signed that letter— introduced a bill allotting $50 million for a Virtual Health Pilot supporting remote patient monitoring programs in rural health clinics and community health centers during the pandemic. The Health Resources and Services Administration would administer those funds.

Shortages of providers trained to treat chronic conditions are “painfully evident” in rural and tribal areas with high rates of diabetes and hypertension, McSally said in a news release.

... As your author reported last week, temporary policies allowing payers to cover more virtual visits and clinicians to practice across state lines have drawn millions of patients to virtual care. Medicare’s fee-for-service program has seen virtual care visits soar from just a few thousand a week to over 1 million.

“Telehealth has rapidly transformed from a technocratic, wonky issue to an essential strategy for keeping people alive,” Schatz told POLITICO. “We’re going to realize that all the changes we enacted ought to be permanent.”

Jon Linkous, who headed the American Telemedicine Association for 24 years and now runs the lobbying group Partnership for Automation and Innovation in Healthcare, urged lawmakers to act decisively rather than mandating more studies. The “history of telehealth regulation has been that, at every opportunity, CMS and other federal and state policy makers will use such a proposed study as a reason to delay making any decision,” he said. “It is time for action, not more studies.”

New VA stats: The Department of Veterans Affairs has seen virtual visits skyrocket from about 10,000 a week to 120,000 between February and May of this year, the Department announced last week. It’s been about three years since the launch of VA Video Connect.

... The department has also handed out about 26,000 tablets to patients, and T-Mobile, Verizon and other wireless providers are waiving data charges for Veterans using VA telehealth services, according to the news release.

What we’re watching: Stats like this are sure to come up during Senate HELP’s telehealth hearing on Wednesday. The session will feature testimony from virtual care heavyweights including UVA’s Karen Rheuban, American Telemedicine Association President Joseph Kvedar, Project Echo’s Sanjeev Arora, and BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee’s Andrea Willis. ATA has urged Congress to permanently remove geographic and site restrictions to Medicare payments on virtual care; generally payments are limited to patients in rural areas in certain facilities.

... And FCC chairman Ajit Pai is set to testify Friday in front of Senate appropriators on airwave auctions, Tech’s John Hendel writes.

MORE THAN HALF OF COVID DATA LACKS RACE, ETHNICITY INFO — Fifty-two percent of reported coronavirus cases in the U.S. are missing information on race or ethnicity, and recent federal guidance on gathering more demographic data won’t take effect until August, our colleagues Laura Barrón-López, Adam Cancryn, Maya King, and Darius Tahir report.

“Unless we use data and focus concretely on race, we are going to let Covid-19 bake in a whole new generation of disparities,” said John Kim, executive director of the racial justice research and policy organization Advancement Project California.

... Brett Giroir, HHS assistant secretary and coronavirus testing czar, acknowledged in testimony to lawmakers earlier this month that the government has not tracked what percentage of people getting tested are minorities. He called it a “flaw in the system.”

“We’re flying blind until this comes in,” Giroir said then. “We can’t develop a national strategy to reach the underserved, or know how well we’re doing, until we have the data that shows us if we’re reaching them or not.”

APPLE EXPANDS WATCH APP AS FDA LOOSENS RULES — A new feature for the Apple Watch makes the Cupertino company the latest firm to take up the FDA on its new regulatory posture for coronavirus.

The company, whose Watch is FDA-cleared for atrial fibrillation classification, is announcing a slightly wider scope for its wrist-worn gizmo: Patients can send ECG waveform recordings as a pdf. That allows providers to diagnose or manage some arrythmia conditions from a distance.

Apple is taking advantage of FDA guidance to promote remote monitoring and telemedicine devices. As we’ve previously written, several companies have been exploring this space, including firms like Medtronic and Livongo.

... In other big tech news, President Donald Trump last week retweeted a former aide’s call for barring Microsoft from federal contracts — a punishment for its pledge to not sell facial recognition software to police departments, Pro Tech’s Cristiano Lima reports. IBM and Amazon have made similar pledges.

The companies are ramping up pressure on Congress to limit police use of facial recognition technology, but they haven’t defused civil rights advocates’ concerns about their potential involvement in surveillance, Cristiano writes.

AUTOMATING QUALITY MEASURES — The American Society of Clinical Oncology has a new application allowing oncology practices to automate some quality and reporting measures for the group’s certification program, ASCO announced last week.

What We're Reading

— Robert Baird reports on the Utah tech industry’s involvement in covornavirus testing for The New Yorker.
— Emily Glazer and Patience Haggin write about voter and advocacy groups’ collection of protesters’ cellphone data for The Wall Street Journal.
— John Glaser makes the case for an EHR overhaul in the Harvard Business Review.
— AP’s Steve Megargee digs into the debate about whether colleges should disclose athletes’ coronavirus statuses.