Part 2 legislative hearing scheduled

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

PART 2 LEGISLATIVE HEARING SCHEDULED: Mark your calendars, folks: May 8, the House Energy and Commerce health subcommittee will be holding a hearing on 42 CFR Part 2, a privacy regulation that adds a layer of confidentiality to behavioral health data. The hearing will specifically focus on Rep. Markwayne Mullin’s Overdose Prevention and Patient Safety Act, H.R. 3545 (115). The subcommittee will be considering an overhaul to Mullin’s original bill; you can read the text of the updated bill here.

This privacy provision has been much discussed recently, with a number of lobbying groups supporting a broad-based change the rule. In March, MACPAC — the group of experts that advises Congress on Medicaid — discussed the newest iteration of the rules, with some commissioners supporting a fairly thorough change. SAMHSA recently tweaked the rule to allow for increased data-sharing in some restricted circumstances, such as operations, but some are pushing increased data-sharing for clinical care.

Privacy and mental health advocates worry about the stigma of a behavioral health diagnosis and worry that medical information describing such a diagnosis can be used against patients in criminal or civil proceedings. For what it’s worth, the amended Mullin bill has a section preventing the use of such records in either type of proceeding — with an exception for court orders in certain circumstances. We’ll see if this provision assuages their concerns.

TELEMEDICINE UPDATE: Our colleague, Mohana provides this update on Zipnois from the American Telemedicine Association conference in Chicago: the company, an asynchronous telemedicine platform that sells to health care providers, expects to better tailor its service to specific patients, chief medical officer Lisa Ide tells her.

Since last year, Zipnosis has been dispatching public health notices through its system to patients in certain geographic areas affected by outbreaks and is “working to make the whole experience more personalized,” Ide says. Another feature Zipnosis currently offers routes patients through the health system directly to the specific level of care they require, and the company is refining that capability, Ide said.

— And Teladoc: Meanwhile, Teladoc, the telemedicine giant, reported its quarterly financial results Tuesday. They are, shall we say, mixed. Depending on your preferred accounting scheme — one that takes into account recent acquisitions or not — the company’s revenue grew somewhere between 47 percent and 109 percent versus a comparable period last year. The company’s U.S. paid membership made 554,000 visits during the first quarter of this year.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that losses grew from $15 million to $23 million, year over year. At least if you take after-hours trading as a guide, the stock jockeys took the good and the bad in stride; Teladoc’s share price was slightly up when we finished the newsletter last night.

eHealth tweet of the day: Mary Childs @mdc Amid ongoing rage at Facebook for scraping/selling all our data, a week after the Golden State Killer was caught using genealogical data, folks at [Milken Institute Global conference] are happily swabbing their phones to submit their DNA to a database, courtesy of Weill Cornell and a quant hedge fund ... ?

WEDNESDAY: One of the delights of the modern world is its production of highly specific products that seemingly have only one limited use. For example, there’s an ice cube maker specifically for cocktails. This weekend, your correspondent acquired an orange peeler. What ugly fate awaits your correspondent if he dares use the orange peeler for, say, apples or potatoes? Warn your correspondent of the consequences at [email protected]. Share other highly specific devices and thingamajigs socially at @arthurallen202, @dariustahir,@ravindranize, @POLITICOPro, @Morning_eHealth.

POLITICO’s Ben White is bringing Morning Money to the Milken Institute Global Conference to provide coverage of the day’s events and evening happenings. The newsletter will run April 29 - May 2. Sign up to keep up with your daily conference coverage.

HIPAA AND THE WHITE HOUSE DOCS: What’s up with the White House and HIPAA? For whatever reason, the health privacy law has become oddly central to the ongoing chaos in the executive branch. Monday, CNN reported that Mike and Karen Pence had developed concerns with onetime Veterans Affairs nominee Ronny Jackson in his role as White House physician – which, they felt, were related to the Second Lady’s rights of medical privacy.

This was followed Tuesday by a report that Dr. Harold Bornstein, the New York doctor who saw Donald Trump in his civilian life, had been “raided” by a group led by Trump’s former bodyguard last year. The group apparently seized Trump’s medical records. All this is apparently “standard operating procedure,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in her daily briefing. Given the inability of most Americans to afford a private record-seizing squad, it’s no wonder the administration supports Blue Button 2.0.

(Pew’s Ben Moscovitch had a more earnest tweet than your correspondent’s preceding words.)

LATEST UPDATE ON THE VA SEARCH: Tuesday also saw another pair of names floated for the vacant Veterans Affairs role. One possibility, current White House chief of staff John Kelly, was shot down by Sanders. The other possibility, Anthony Tersigni of large health system Ascension Health, hasn’t been addressed publicly as far as we can tell.

GARMIN, UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS PARTNER: Garmin and its health division are partnering with the University of Kanas Medical Center to test the company’s wearable devices as a way to monitor for sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation. They’re joining a crowd of competitors seeking to use wearables in health care contexts; Fitbit partnered with Google Cloud earlier in the week, hoping to ease data sharing. And of course Apple has looking into using its Watch to pick up cases of atrial fibrillation.

WHAT WE’RE CLICKING ON:

Bob Wachter writes on evolving technology for the doctor-patient relationship in the Wall Street Journal.

Wired discusses the trend of startups building voice assistants to help physicians document in the electronic health record.

An NBC Chicago investigation reveals that some home DNA tests cannot distinguish dog from human DNA.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is allowing patients to access their images through their portal.

Another discussion of Amazon’s health care plans!