Hospital group attacks new interoperability rules

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

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Today’s the deadline to comment on potential HIPAA modifications. HIMSS19 will really get underway with this opening keynote featuring CMS’s Seema Verma. Here’s what else we were tracking on one of eHealth’s newsiest days:

— Hospital group attacks new interoperability rules: ONC and CMS’ long awaited rule proposals finally dropped Monday. Health IT groups are generally supportive, though the American Hospital Association said it opposed a key provision.

— Trump signs AI executive order: To remain competitive with China, President Donald Trump signed an executive order encouraging federal agencies to invest in AI.

— Apple to unroll EHR feature at VA: Patients at the Veterans Health Administration will be able to access and aggregate their health records on their smartphones, Apple says.

eHealth Tweet of the day: Shannon Sartin @sartin_shannon If you can afford a booth at #HIMSS19, you can afford to give data to your patients. Just saying.

It’s TUESDAY at at Morning eHealth. Now that the rule proposals are out, what eHealth topics are you tracking? Let us know at [email protected]. Tweet the team at @arthurallen202, @dariustahir, @ravindranize, @POLITICOPro and @Morning_eHealth.

HOSPITAL GROUP ATTACKS NEW INTEROPERABILITY RULES — The Trump administration debuted its long-awaited interoperability rules Monday for the first day of HIMSS to mostly positive reviews from health IT leaders, though some deferred comment until they could consume all 955 pages of prose. (As we reported Monday, the two proposed rules would require health care providers to deploy standardized methods of sharing data, known as open APIs, so patients’ information would move easily with them when they switched health plans or doctors. They would also require that developers use the HL7 FHIR standard. For a refresher, Pros can click here.)

— Among critics was the nation’s biggest hospital group, which on Monday night attacked a key element of the proposed CMS rule to improve health care data sharing. The American Hospital Association said it opposed CMS’s proposed requirement that hospitals issue electronic notification of the admission, discharge or transfer of patients.

“We believe CMS already has better levers to ensure the exchange of appropriate health information for patients,” the group said in a news release. “We recommend the agency focus on building this exchange infrastructure rather than layering additional requirements on hospitals.”

— Morgan Reed, president of ACT | The App Association, was pleased with the proposal, though he felt CMS and ONC could have gone further to ensure that APIs support two-way communication so that patients can aggregate records from various physicians.

The proposals don’t fully address the costs of adopting API standards, he said. Someone, potentially IT vendors or developers, is “going to have to pay for some of the changes in the system” — and some of those costs might be passed along to providers or patients. Pros can read more on reactions to the rulemaking here.

— In call with reporters Monday, CMS administrator Seema Verma said the agency aims to use a new interoperability rule to “expose the bad actors who are purposely trying to keep patients from their own data.”

Under the new rule proposal, CMS would publish the names of providers who answer “no” to any one of three questions about data-sharing practices. Rather than “increase government control of health care decisions,” the administration is focusing on giving patients more data so they can better understand their care and the associated costs, Verma explained.

— Verma also said that while CMS’s API standards proposal applies to insurers participating in federal programs, it would still affect more than 100 million patients. Insurers might be incentivized to make data available to all patients using APIs, since “they’re already going to be making the investment,” she said.

Asked about how much patients might pay for apps that use such APIs, Verma said it would be “up to the patient.”

“There’s not a requirement that a patient has to take their data, and turn it over to the app developer,” she said. Patients might use choose to use free record-viewing systems; apps that add new features might have a small cost. But “you can’t charge the patient [just] for their data, because it’s their data and it belongs to them,” she said. (Pros can read more from Verma and ONC head Don Rucker here.)

... On FHIR standards, HL7 has opened applications for its new accelerator program that helps groups aiming to implement them.

TRUMP SIGNS AI EXECUTIVE ORDER: President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday aimed at bolstering the federal government’s role in the development of artificial intelligence technology, our POLITICO colleague Steven Overly reports.

The White House will offer guidance to individual agencies on ways to regulate AI that build public trust in the technology without slowing innovation. The order also calls on federal agencies to allocate more resources for artificial intelligence research and make much-sought-after data more widely available to companies, among other provisions. The full text of the executive order can be found here.

APPLE TO UNROLL EHR FEATURE AT VHA: Apple is offering the EHR feature it debuted about a year ago to more patients. Veterans who get care at the VA will soon be able to download their personal medical data onto an iPhone app.

Veterans will be able to get information on their allergies and conditions as well as immunizations, lab results, medications and procedures through the iPhone Health app, which is already widely available to patients in the private sector.

The capacity grew out of the 2010 VA Blue Button project and is part of the VA Lighthouse project. Some vets will gain access by the summer and the app should be available to all 9 million VA customers by the end of 2019, officials said.

“It’s better to release early and often and have the ability to roll back if something goes wrong, rather than waiting until everything is finished and hoping it works,” said VA Chief Technology Officer Charles Worthington.

He said the Cerner purchase was part of the VA’s new IT outlook, which stressed buying off-the-shelf products. Pros can read the rest of the story here.

ATHENAHEALTH COMPLETES $5.7 B DEAL: Practice management and EHR software vendor athenahealth was acquired by Veritas Capital and Elliott Management’s Evergreen Coast Capital, the company announced Monday. The proposed merger was first announced in November.

Athenahealth will combine with Veritas’ portfolio company Virence Health, under the athenahealth name. Bob Segert, who currently leads Virence Health, will head the new company from athenahealth’s offices in Watertown, Mass. Virence Health sells its own health IT products and was formerly part of GE Healthcare.

PARTNERS’ EHR SYSTEM DOWN: Partners’ EHR system was temporarily down Monday, Darius reports. A technical team is reviewing the matter for the root cause. The Massachusetts system — whose hospitals include Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital — is one of the dominant systems in the region. Its implementation of an Epic EHR was projected to take up $1.2 billion in system resources. Pros can read the rest of the story here.

NEW DATA MODEL FROM AMA: The American Medical Association’s Integrated Health Model Initiative, which explores the organization of health data, has a new model for managing the data generated by remote blood pressure monitors.

SALESFORCE DIGS INTO SOCIAL DETERMINANTS: The software company has updated its Health Cloud offering so that health care providers and payers can sort through patients or members’ social determinants of health data quicker, chief medical officer Josh Newman tells Morning eHealth. By presenting demographic, geographic and socioeconomic data in a single tab, the company might nudge providers or payers to tailor their outreach to individual patients, Newman says.

Alphabet’s Google Ventures hired biotech VC David Schenkein, previously of Agios Pharmaceuticals, to lead life sciences investments... New White House Domestic Policy Council Director Joe Grogan has tapped a 27-year-old HHS official Abe Sutton to work on prescription drug, Medicare and other health care issues, our colleague Adam Cancryn reports...

CMS, including its Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation, is hiringinterns. (h/t Lisa Bari)

—Bloomberg’s Rebecca Spalding has more on David Schenkein
—This episode of the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast is about alarms, alert sounds and alert fatigue (h/t Adrianna McIntyre)