Industry cheers for Senate cost-cutting bill

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

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Quick Fix

Lots of legislative chatter in Washington this week as a we gear up for Memorial Day. Here’s what we’ve got:

— Industry cheers for Senate cost-cutting bill: Trade groups appear enthusiastic about a draft of the Senate HELP Committee’s legislation to cut health care costs.

— VA opposes proposed EHR committee: A proposed oversight board for the $16 billion Cerner health IT contract is unnecessary, a department official argued.

— CMS pressing forward with interop rule: We’ve been talking about interoperability for long enough, and it’s time to deliver a rule, according to Administrator Seema Verma.

eHealth Tweet of the day: Margot Sanger-Katz @sangerkatz, “Latest adventure in medical records: I asked my provider for a radiology report. I was told the *only* way I can get it is by visiting the office in person. It is “against the law” for them to mail, fax or email it to me.

(I did mention that it would not be a HIPAA violation to send me my *own* medical record. But that argument did not make much of an impression.)”

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Driving the Day

DATA TRANSPARENCY CUTS COSTS — Health IT is central to a Senate HELP Committee package designed to cut costs, eHealth’s Darius Tahir reports — and trade groups seem to be on board.

The bill, introduced by Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and ranking member Patty Murray (D-Wash.), would require that private payers use APIs to share claims information, expected out-of-pocket costs and in-network doctors.

It would also push for better cybersecurity by letting HHS’ Office for Civil Rights consider providers’ adoption of recognized security practices as part of its audits, Darius writes. Pros can read the story here.

...The American Medical Group Association appreciated the bill’s emphasis on claims data. “Moving through the healthcare system can be daunting for patients,” AMGA CEO Jerry Penso said in a statement Thursday. It’s difficult for members to guide patients “without a complete understanding of all the care they have received.”

...Getting OCR to account for groups “trying to secure their ecosystems is incredibly important and appreciated,” Leslie Krigstein, vice president for Congressional Affairs at College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, told Morning eHealth. It’s been a CHIME ask for years, she said, to “stop ‘victimizing the victim’ when health systems despite their best efforts fall victim to nation-state bad actors or organized crime.”

In other OCR news, Medical Informatics Engineering, an Indiana-based software and EHR company, paid a $100,000 settlement to the agency for a HIPAA breach. MIE filed a breach report in 2015 after discovering hackers had accessed protected health information belonging to about 3.5 million people, and OCR concluded MIE hadn’t done a comprehensive risk analysis before the breach.

VA SAYS NO TO CERNER OVERSIGHT — The Veterans Affairs Department opposed a Senate bill, S. 1154 (116), that would establish an independent advisory committee to oversee the $16 billion Cerner EHR implementation, eHealth’s Arthur Allen writes.

Teresa Boyd, assistant deputy undersecretary for Health for Clinical Operations, told the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee this week that the VA already has enough avenues for oversight by Congress and other groups.

Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) put forth the bill, which would create an 11-member committee with clinical, IT and managerial expertise, and veteran service organization members. Federal officials and EHR vendors would not be included. Pros can read the rest here.

VERMA: IT’S ABOUT TIME FOR INTEROP RULE — CMS is pushing forward with its interoperability rulemaking, despite entreaties from industry groups who’ve asked the agency to take its time. “All options are on the table,” she said — maybe even an interim final rule — but CMS has already extended the public comment period on the proposal it dropped in February, Verma told reporters this week.

“We’ve been talking about interoperability for years, and it’s time to deliver that to the health care system and to patients,” she said. The proposal, published along with ONC’s proposed clarification on information blocking, would require insurers participating in public programs to adopt data sharing standards. Pros can read more here.

...Comments on both proposals are still rolling in before the June 3 deadline. The American Medical Informatics Association said ONC’s proposed rulemaking “perpetuates an imbalance where patients, clinicians, and researchers are beholden to health IT developers for routine access, exchange, and use of health data.” The group “flatly reject[s] a policy that requires data to be standard before it can be used.”

FDA’S CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS — The FDA wants more participants to help test its software regulation pilot, Darius reports. So far it’s had nine participants, including Apple and Johnson & Johnson, in the pre-certification program. Multiple pre-pilot participants have said their peers were not particularly active during policy discussions, Darius reports — though FDA has denied that assertion. Pros can read more here.

...The move to open up the program raised skepticism from observers, including Epstein Becker Green lawyer Bradley Merrill Thompson. “That was not the plan as recently as January,” he told Morning eHealth. “They thought they had enough to do with just the nine pilot participants. It makes me wonder if some of the nine have needed to drop out for some reason.”

STARK, ANTI-KICKBACK ON TRUMP’S RADAR THIS SPRING — A White House regulatory agenda out this week shows that the Trump administration plans to release proposals on the Stark Law and anti-kickback statute by July, our colleague Rachel Roubein reports. Last year, Deputy HHS Secretary Eric Hargan unveiled a “Regulatory Sprint to Coordinated Care” that includes a focus on modifying HIPAA and changing federal regulations to substance use privacy rule 42 CFR Part 2, Rachel writes. Pros can read more here.

PRIVACY DOWNLOAD — Lawmakers delved into data privacy protection this week, and EU officials proposed more fines for tech companies. News of note:

— California Sen. Dianne Feinstein is the first Democratic co-sponsor for the Do Not Track Act, a bill led by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) that would create a “do not track” registry for consumers data, our POLITICO colleague Cristiano Lima reports.

— Hawley’s making a name as a leading Republican critic of big tech companies. In an op-ed in USA TODAY, he deemed Facebook, Instagram and Twitter “parasite on productive investment, on meaningful relationships, on a healthy society.”

— Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) this week urged Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to clarify the extent to which voice assistant Alexa keeps audio recordings and transcripts of user conversations. Customers “may not have as much control over their privacy as Amazon had indicated,” he wrote in a letter to Bezos.

— A year into enforcing GDPR, EU Justice Commissioner Věra Jourová warned of more fines for tech companies, our POLITICO EU colleagues Laurens Cerulus and Laura Kayali report. “The fines may be slow, but it is certain they will come,” she said.

Research Corner

THE CASE FOR VIRTUAL INFORMATION SESSIONS — Telemedicine can simplify an already burdensome process for abortion patients in states where they’re required to attend an information session before getting the procedure, a new qualitative study finds. Planned Parenthood Association of Utah has been offering these mandatory information sessions via videoconference since 2015, and patients say the virtual option saved them the lost income and gas money they’d have to sacrifice for the additional in-person visit to the clinic, the study finds. Virtual consultations also afforded patients more privacy, since they didn’t have to be seen at the clinic, researchers Katherine Ehrenreich, Shelly Kaller, Sarah Raifman and Daniel Grossman found.

What We're Reading

— Customers of online drug sellers like Hims and Roman are paying heavily marked-up prices, Kristen V Brown, Gerrit De Vynck, and Robert Langreth report for Bloomberg.

— Anti-vax doctors are ordering 23andMe tests to analyze a gene whose mutations they think predispose certain children to bad reactions to vaccines, The Atlantic’s Sarah Zhang writes.