Life insurer embraces diabetes tech

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

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Quick Fix

Looking ahead this week, HITAC’s annual report work group convenes Wednesday to discuss interoperability, security and ONC and CMS’ final rules, co-chair Aaron Miri tells us. Here’s what else we’ve got:

— Life insurance embraces diabetes tech: John Hancock CEO Brooks Tingle tells Morning eHealth about plans to nudge diabetes patients to live healthier.

— Why kidney care depends on health data: More up-to-date and interoperable health IT would help health systems single out the highest-risk patients, cutting down on crash dialysis starts, says the leader of one nonprofit.

— Sen. Mark Warner dings HHS on privacy: The Virginia Democrat continues to highlight privacy and cybersecurity challenges in health care.

eHealth Tweet of the day, on the passing of Kaiser Permanente CEO Bernard Tyson: Halle Tecco @halletecco “A terrible and unexpected loss for the healthcare community. @BernardJTyson was an outstanding leader and will be greatly missed. https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/kaiser-permanente-ceo-bernard-tyson-dies/"

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Driving the Day

LIFE INSURER PUSHES DIABETES TECH — Life insurance customers with type 2 diabetes will soon be able to shave up to 25 percent off their premiums if they manage their condition through a new program offered by insurer John Hancock, Alphabet’s life sciences division Verily, and diabetes prevention tech company Onduo. (Onduo is a joint venture between Verily and pharmaceutical company Sanofi.)

… The program, which starts this month, gives certain customers blood glucose monitors and access to Onduo’s app, which gathers data about their condition and makes personalized recommendations about food and exercise. Customers can make telemedicine appointments with clinicians through the app and can earn points for keeping their glucose levels within a certain range or making significant progress toward a goal.

“We make no secret about the fact that it’s good for our business” to help life insurance customers live longer and healthier lives, John Hancock President and CEO Brooks Tingle told Morning eHealth last month. The company already allows Fitbit and Apple Watch users to earn rewards for meeting step counts and other health goals. Tingle was headed to Capitol Hill, where he’s been in talks with lawmakers generally about ways to nudge people to eat healthier and take preventive care, though there’s no specific legislative agenda.

… The program could also attract new customers who thought they were too risky for life insurance plans, Tingle said.

What interoperability means for life insurance: Efforts to make health data more accessible to patients could expedite the insurance underwriting process, which today can take up to eight weeks (customers must file a 33-page application, hand over blood and urine samples, and grant access to their health records, which are then analyzed extensively.) If patients could instantly share records via an app, they could get a quote back in a matter of minutes, Tingle said.

… The industry isn’t there yet, and Tingle emphasized that automated prediction and artificial intelligence should play a very small role in underwriting. It’s important for insurers to be able to explain to customers exactly why their premium is what it is, he said. “Underwriting is one of those things that for the foreseeable future will still have a human element.”

BETTER HEALTH IT MEANS BETTER KIDNEYS — Interoperability is integral to kidney care, too, one nonprofit says. As HHS ramps up efforts to fulfill Trump’s executive order to improve kidney care, the keys will be health IT, artificial intelligence and predictive analytics, Michael Spigler, the American Kidney Fund’s vice president of patient services and kidney disease education, told Morning eHealth. (HRSA is planning a request for information on how updating health IT could improve organ allocation; HHS also plans to publish an RFI on trials for wearable and implantable artificial kidneys.)

While the American Kidney Fund supports the federal government’s efforts to slow the progression of kidney disease, managing the disease is just one part of the problem, Spigler said in an email. Another major challenge is matching patients to donors; viable organs are lost when that match can’t be made in time. “Modernizing IT systems to better match patients in need of organs with donors is critical,” he wrote.

Current IT systems also aren’t great at predicting which patients are at highest risk for kidney disease; more sophisticated AI models could flag the populations likely to develop kidney disease and suggest tests and treatment earlier, preventing patients from reacting poorly to dialysis later, he said.

HHS IGNORING IMAGING PRIVACY ISSUES, WARNER CHARGES — HHS is not addressing an imaging privacy scandal, Sen. Mark Warner charged in a Friday letter to Office for Civil Rights Director Roger Severino.

The scandal, which grew out of a ProPublica report in September, concerns the easy availability of millions of patients’ images and other sensitive medical data online. Warner says that one of the companies at the center of the problem, TridentUSA Health Services, told him it passed OCR’s HIPAA audit in March.

Warner also wants to know whether HHS is responding generally to tips it receives regarding cybersecurity problems, and how it’s protecting imaging data. He wants an answer by Nov. 18.

DELRAHIM: DATA AND PRIVACY SHOULD INFORM ANTITRUST REVIEWS — The Justice Department’s antitrust chief Makan Delrahim says companies that gather large amounts of data can threaten competition, our POLITICO Tech colleague Steven Overly reports.

... “Just as antitrust enforcers care about companies charging higher prices or degrading quality ... it may be important to examine circumstances where companies acquire or extract more data from consumers in exchange for less” privacy or user benefit, Delrahim said at an antitrust conference last week hosted by the Computer and Communications Industry Association. Members of that group include Google, Facebook and Amazon. “Amassing a large quantity of data is not necessarily anticompetitive,” he noted. “The more complicated question for enforcers is how data is collected, analyzed, and used, and, most importantly, whether these practices harm competition.”

... He said that while “privacy fits primarily within the realm of consumer protection law, it would be a grave mistake to believe that privacy concerns can never play a role in antitrust analysis.” DOJ plans to continue to study market power in industries where “data plays a key role,” he said.

FROM THE HEALTH INFORMATION EXCHANGE CIRCUIT — The Georgia Health Information Network gave its members $500,000 in grants to speed technology adoption and the exchange of health data in 2019; 50 providers were added to the network during that time, according to that group.

Further north, the Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services has signed an agreement with Great Lakes Health Connect, a statewide health information exchange, to integrate. The two plan to combine operations by the end of the year.

NAMES IN THE NEWS — Trump’s former VA secretary pick and former White House physician Ronny Jackson, who withdrew from the confirmation process amid allegations that he inappropriately prescribed pills and drank on the job, is considering running for Congress in Texas’ 13th District, Roll Call reports.

ON TAP THIS WEEK — The Connected Health Initiative hosts a briefing called “What Will Privacy Legislation Mean for Healthcare in the 116th Congress?” in Dirksen this Friday. ONC head Don Rucker is slated to deliver the keynote; panel participants include CHI’s Graham Dufault, Joy Pritts, ONC’s former chief privacy officer; AMA’s Laura Hoffman; Intel’s Jackie Medecki and Particle Health’s AJ Audino.

What We're Reading

— MIT Technology Review’s Antonio Regalado writesabout DNA tests that can flag embryos with a risk of low intelligence or disease.

— Blake Montgomery writes for The Daily Beast about Google and Twitter approving ads that say vaccines aren’t safe.

— Stat’s Megan Thielking writes about a telemedicine clinic kiosk at Tampa General Hospital.

— Oscar Schwartz writes about implantable microchips for The Guardian.