A call to upgrade public health data

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

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Quick Fix

ONC’s advisory committee task force on the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement convenes virtually twice this week. Here’s what else we’re tracking:

— A call to revive public health data: AMIA, EHRA and others urged Senate appropriators to set aside funding to update public health IT systems and better predict disease outbreaks.

— The latest on CMS’ AI challenge: CMS’ long-term goal is to incorporate what it gathers into its internal operations.

— Study finds about one in 10 Instagram posts advertising drug sales: A group of researchers are using machine learning to flag posts pushing opioids and other illegal drugs.

eHealth Tweetof the day: Paul Kedrosky @pkedrosky It’s instructive how 20- and 30-somethings evince surprise that many elderly people aren’t adopting telemedicine and want to go to the doctor. As a retina specialist friend once told me, “Seeing a doctor for a regular visit is often the highlight of many elderly patients’ week”.

It’s MONDAY at Morning eHealth. What’s on tap this week? Tips go to [email protected]. Tweet the team at @arthurallen202, @dariustahir, @ravindranize, @POLITICOPro and @Morning_eHealth.

Driving the Day

TODAY’S PUBLIC HEALTH IT SYSTEMS JUST FOR ‘STATIC DATA'—The data collection systems public health organizations use are so outdated that it’s difficult to get ahead of outbreaks of diseases, several experts said during a briefing at the Capitol last week. They — along with 90 health groups — wrote senior Senate appropriators Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) to commit $100 million in fiscal 2020 toward a CDC effort to update public health surveillance. The House’s fiscal year appropriations budget included funding for that effort, they pointed out.

Such funding would help the CDC, state, local, tribal, territorial and other health departments better share data by moving from paper-based systems to automated ones, allowing public health experts to predict disease outbreaks before they happen, the groups wrote.

“The systems we have in place were created for static data,” Joanne Bartkus, director of the Minnesota Public Health Laboratory, said during last week’s briefing. She said some states aren’t even sharing data on certain diseases because the reporting system is too burdensome. Among co-signers were AcademyHealth, AMIA, EHRA, and the Joint Commission.

... Also in public health, our colleague Dan Goldberg reports from Georgia that maternal and infant health might be worse than we thought, potentially because of gaps in public health data. The CDC has undertaken efforts to improve data collection on that topic, and “growing awareness means more states are stepping up efforts to track deaths for the full year after childbirth.” They’re coming to recognize there are multiple causes, not just a question of access to care.

AI COULD BRING REAL-TIME INTERVENTIONS AT CMS—CMS is wading through applications to its AI Health Outcomes Challengeand plans to announce winners at the beginning of August. Speaking at a CHIME advocacy event last week, CMS’ Lisa Bari noted that one of the goals is to discover technology that the agency could use internally. That might include algorithms that CMS can use to suggest interventions like home visits or care management to the groups participating in payment experiments, according to an agency spokesperson. CMS is also searching for technology that front-line clinicians can understand, the spokesperson said.

INSTAGRAM CHOCK FULL OF OPIOIDS, STUDY FINDS—A new study used machine learning to flag Instagram posts mentioning opioid and other illegal drug sales — and roughly 10 percent of more than 12,000 posts were from users advertising drugs, researchers found. Buyers and sellers also discussed transactions in the comments; researchers recommended that social media platforms crack down on illegal sales on their sites. Among the researchers is UCSD’s Timothy Mackey, who has presented at two of FDA’s summits on social media and drug sales. (We wrote about Mackey’s other research for Pro back in March.)

SURVEY: HEALTH CARE ORGS ARE INVESTING IN CYBER—A survey of 600-plus health care organizations by CHIME and KLAS released Friday shows that many organizations are moving from homegrown identity and access management to commercial solutions to support their identity policies. It found that most organizations have network access control solutions to monitor devices that connect to their networks, but fewer than half of small organizations are using network segmentation to control the spread of infections. Large organizations report more sophisticated and more frequent vulnerability scanning and application testing, while smaller ones more frequently turn to penetration testing to identify vulnerabilities, according to the report.

NEW DATA SCIENCE FELLOWSHIP—The University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, San Francisco and Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Research & Development are partnering to support a two-year fellowship for data scientists. Selected applicants will work on two-year research projects, and can tap expertise from people at all three institutions, they said in an announcement.

Health IT Business Watch

BIG WEEK FOR DIABETES TECH—Digital health coaching startup Livongo has filed to go public. The company netted revenue of $68.4 million in 2018. As we noted in Morning eHealth last week, competitor Omada Health recently announced a $73 million funding round.

THERANOS’ HOLMES PLANS ATTACK ON JOURNALIST—Elizabeth Holmes, founder of blood testing company Theranos, is preparing to blame Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou during her trial in July 2020, Bloomberg’s Joel Rosenblatt reports. Holmes is facing criminal fraud charges for deceiving investors, doctors and patients about the technology’s ability to produce accurate blood tests; her attorneys argue that Carreyrou’s reporting, which highlighted Theranos’ activity, influenced federal regulators.

What We're Reading

—Moms are driving telemedicine app usage, CNBC’s Chrissy Farr reports.
—Bob Wachter, Timothy Judson, and Michelle Mourad write a JAMA Viewpoint about targeted automatic e-consults.