Tech rivals team up during pandemic

With help from Darius Tahir (@dariustahir) and Cristiano Lima (@viaCristiano)

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Quick Fix

— Tech rivals set differences aside during pandemic: In a rare partnership, Apple and Google have agreed to make technology available by mid-May that can detect when people have come into contact with someone believed to have the coronavirus.

— FCC readies telehealth fund: The Federal Communications Commission will start vetting applications for its $200 million fund supporting virtual care during the pandemic.

— NIH examines undetected spread: The agency wants up to 10,000 volunteers so it can figure out how many adults without a confirmed coronavirus diagnosis have evidence of the infection in their blood.

eHealth tweetof the day: William Pietri @williampietri “Anybody who thinks taxonomies can be universal and perfect is invited to put away a load of dishes in somebody else’s kitchen.”

Welcome to MONDAY at Morning eHealth. If you’re building a contact tracing app, tell us how it’s going at [email protected]. Tweet the team at @dariustahir, @ravindranize, @POLITICOPro and @Morning_eHealth.

Given the unprecedented public health challenge confronting regulatory affairs teams, the AgencyIQ leadership team has decided to pull research and analysis content concerning the virus and its regulatory implications in front of the paywall. It is available online.

Driving the Day

NO SOLID PLAN FOR REOPENING — The White House is moving to reopen the economy as early as the beginning of May, but top officials haven’t agreed on a plan for safely doing that, POLITICO’s Nancy Cook reports.

"[S]enior administration officials are engaged in an earnest yet scattershot effort to support President Donald Trump’s long-expressed desire to revive the downward-spiraling economy and stabilize the volatile financial markets in the middle of an election year,” Nancy writes. “Some officials are looking at data from states to make their recommendations, while economic officials are weighing moves to change tax policy to boost growth once again.

“Trump and his top aides are receiving advice from a number of executives and donors, some of whom are urging him to reopen the country in phases. The president and his advisers have yet to settle on the benchmarks they’ll use to decide which parts of the country reopen and when.”

Elsewhere in Trumpworld, a dangerous fight over data models predicting death count and spread has infiltrated the coronavirus response, POLITICO’s David Siders and Myah Ward report.

“Early on, bleak forecasts spurred support for extreme social-distancing measures, shutting down whole swaths of the American economy,” they write. “But in recent days, as scientists lowered projections for deaths from Covid-19 — in large part, scientists said, because social distancing is working — influential conservatives began casting the data as evidence the virus was never really that bad.”

Fox News host Tucker Carlson, for example, called the model used by the White House “completely disconnected from reality,” saying, “At this point, we should not be surprised that the model got it wrong.”

... The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington this week lowered its projections to about 60,000 deaths by August, a significant reduction from White House officials’ earlier estimates. The adjustment touched off a furious round of second-guessing, David and Myah write.

TESTING ROUNDUP — Here’s the latest on diagnostics for current and past coronavirus cases:

— This weekend FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn acknowledged the need to increase testing, but warned that having an inaccurate test is worse than not having a test at all, POLITICO’s Rishika Dugyala reports.

Increasing testing, “both diagnostic as well as the antibody tests, will really be necessary as we move beyond May into the summer months and then into the fall,” Hahn said on ABC’s “This Week, adding that the United States has done over 2 million tests,. “We need to do more. No question about that.”

... “There’s going to be plenty of time to look back on this,” Hahn said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It’s really important to remember that these tests have to be valid and accurate and reliable.”

Still, he said he was “concerned that some of the antibody tests that are in the market that haven’t gone through the FDA scientific review may not be as accurate as we’d like them to be.”

— Speaking of antibody tests, the Trump administration said this weekend it would require private insurers to pay for them. “It is critical that Americans have peace of mind knowing that cost won’t be a barrier to testing during this national public health emergency,” said CMS head Seema Verma.

— NIH plans to use antibody tests to get a clearer picture of the pandemic’s magnitude, POLITICO’s David Lim reports. Fauci told CNN on Friday that the government is considering potentially issuing certificatesto Americans with detected coronavirus antibodies as part of efforts to restart the U.S. economy.

The test — developed by researchers at the NIAID and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering — is for research use only and doesn’t need to be reviewed by the FDA, study principal investigator Matt Memoli told POLITICO.

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APPLE, GOOGLE PARTNER ON CONTACT TRACING — The companies are working on technology that uses Bluetooth on people’s Android and iOS phones to determine whether they’ve come into contact with someone who’s tested positive for coronavirus, your author reports along with Pro Tech’s Leah Nylen. Authorized developers could use the technology in apps that notify people when they’ve had such an encounter.

... Health officials agree that contact tracing is essential to reopening the country. This week CDC Director Robert Redfield said health groups are widely investigating contact tracing, whether it’s done using technology or through “old-fashioned” epidemiological research.

“Privacy, transparency, and consent are of utmost importance in this effort,” the companies said in a joint statement. The companies emphasized that consumers would need to opt-in to the contact-tracing technology.

... It’s not clear how well the system will work. It might slip up in dense environments such as apartment buildings where phones could pick up signals through walls and give false positive results, noted Ashkan Soltani, formerly chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission.

Some researchers say the parternship will make contact tracing much easier. One MIT prototype uses short-range Bluetooth signals to automate contact tracing; Android phones are easier to trace, while Apple devices previously had to be jailbroken before the lab could trace them, said Marc Zissman, associate head of MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Cyber Security and Information Sciences Division.

... Passive tracking isn’t the same as asking people over the phone or video chat whom they’ve been interacting with, said Eric Perakslis, a Duke University health data scientist. “I’m not sure these things end up being much better than just straight computational models of what infection probabilities are,” he said. “This model is the absolute minimum exposure that’s going on.”

Still, a lot isn’t understood about how coronavirus is transmitted among people who show no symptoms. “We can’t rely on people’s memory of who they were near at the time, or reports, because they won’t know and it may involve a number of strangers,” said Ken Mandl, who directs the Boston Children’s Hospital’s Computational Health Informatics program.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Friday that the state was talking with Google and Apple about the contact-tracing technology.

In New Mexico, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham told CNN’s Jake Tapper about using cell phone data to track people’s movements to measure whether social distancing policies are working. The data’s coming from Descartes Labs in Santa Fe, CNN reports.

“I think that some folks got confused that somehow this is state data and state effort. And it isn’t. It’s also aggregate cell phone data for the entire country,” Lujan Grisham said. “We don’t have any idea who any of the cell phone numbers belong to, not just in New Mexico, but nowhere in the country.”

TODAY: FCC READY FOR TELEHEALTH APPLICATIONS — As part of coronavirus relief, Congress delivered $200 million to bolster the FCC’s telehealth efforts. Today the commission will begin accepting applications to its new COVID-19 Telehealth Program, as John reported Friday for Pros. Keep an eye on this FCC portal going live for applicants.

... Also on telehealth, CMS guidance from last week lets Medicare Advantage plans and groups submitting diagnoses for risk adjusted payment now submit ones from telehealth visits, as long as the visits meet certain requirements.

What We're Reading

— Researchers collaborating with Microsoft find a wide regional variation in coronavirus fatality risk, they write in Health Affairs.
— Tech companies including Palantir are crunching confidential patient data in the U.K. for coronavirus response, Paul Lewis, David Conn and David Pegg report for The Guardian.
— Merrill Goozner imagines coronavirus response with a national health information exchange for Modern Healthcare.