All of Us tops 270,000 sign-ups

With help from Arthur Allen (@arthurallen202), Darius Tahir (@dariustahir) and Dan Diamond (@ddiamond)

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Quick Fix

We’re gearing up for ONC’s third interoperability forum next week, where officials will update us on the “state of interoperability” and other health IT buzzwords. Until then, here’s some news to tide you over:

All of Us tops 270,000 sign-ups — About 80 percent of participants in NIH’s massive research program have shared their biospecimens.

Lawmakers fight RxCheck — Elected officials are pushing back on requirements that state prescription drug monitoring programs incorporate RxCheck, the federally sanctioned technology for sharing data across state lines.

Study: Most providers don’t comply with patient info access laws — Data-sharing startup Ciitizen found that more than half of health care providers don’t meet HIPAA requirements for making data accessible to patients.

eHealth tweet of the day: Jordan Dale, @JDaleMD, “I’ve been through enough EHR upgrades to know it is a good thing when the only emails from colleagues post-upgrade are about small font changes they weren’t expecting. And fonts always change (whether perceived or actual) with upgrades”

IT’S FRIDAY at Morning eHealth where your author hopes those of you collecting your kids from summer camp haven’t been secretly surveilling them, as Drew Harwell describes in The Washington Post. News tips go to [email protected]. Tweet the team at @arthurallen202, @dariustahir, @ravindranize, @POLITICOPro and @Morning_eHealth.

Driving the Day

ALL OF US ON THE UP AND UP — The $2.3 billion, NIH-led All of Us project is reporting good progress toward its goal of recruiting “historically underrepresented” groups. As of July, more than 80 percent of the 175,000 core participants who have contributed biospecimens to the giant research project are minorities or others typically left out of biomedical research, according to a report from the researchers in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday.

Recruitment is going strong, with a total of 270,000 people signing up for at least some participation (not all have provided biospecimens yet). Of those who are all in — blood, DNA, EHR records, personal data — 51 percent are non-white and 80 percent meet NIH’s “underrepresented” definition (which includes people with lower education and income levels). Researchers expect to hit the 1 million “core” participant mark in 2024.

The paper included a note of optimism about its strategy for learning lots of things about us all: “EHR data can be fragmented, incomplete and inaccurate; however in certain contexts such data have already proved to be a powerful and efficient discovery tool.”

ELECTED OFFICIALS LOBBY ON GRANT REQUIREMENTS — Special requirements on federal grants to use RxCheck, a fledgling data-sharing method for state PDMPs, are earning another set of critics: elected officials. In recent weeks, letters from the Indiana governor and the entire Minnesota congressional delegation to HHS and DOJ have protested the feds’ insistence that states sign up to use RxCheck, eHealth’s Darius Tahir reports.

The letters argue the existing, private-sector PMP InterConnect is working perfectly well, and the requirement to reply to incoming RxCheck requests with RxCheck replies forces an additional administrative burden on states — or an abandonment of PMP InterConnect.

The controversy, which has simmered since fall 2018, has been prompted by federal attempts to require states to sign up for RxCheck, arguing that the system will be lower cost, particularly for rural hospitals. In response to the letters, HHS emphasized that the grant conditions don’t force states away from any data-sharing method.

...Also on pharmacy operations, the Pentagon said it has slashed average wait times at the Madigan Army Medical Center from up to two hours to between 20 and 25 minutes over the past year. Outpatient pharmacist supervisor Johnny Hong said that could be partly because staff have become more familiar with the MHS Genesis EHR implementation.

But as eHealth’s Arthur Allen reported last year, the initial rollout of the Cerner system was fraught with problems. Asked what wait times were before implementation, a Program Executive Office, Defense Healthcare Management Systems spokesperson told Morning eHealth they didn’t have wait time data from before implementation, but that MHS Genesis has had several upgrades since then.

CIITIZEN CALLS FOR MORE HIPAA ENFORCEMENT — Preliminary research from data-sharing startup Ciitizen found that about 56 percent of surveyed institutions probably weren’t in compliance with HIPAA’s patient data access standards, Darius reports.

Ciitizen researchers asked the roughly 3,000 institutions how they’d respond to patient requests to be sent health data via email or on a CD; more than 700 tried to charge impermissible fees, and more than 300 wouldn’t send data by email. The researchers, who include former HHS Office for Civil Rights official Deven McGraw, said the results were better than expected but “additional enforcement of the right of access by OCR is needed.”

...Also on privacy, the British Information Commissioner’s Office has launched an investigation into facial recognition technology used in London’s King’s Cross area, our POLITICO colleague Emma Anderson writes. That probe follows a Financial Times report on the use of the technology by a property developer, who has maintained it complies with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.

“Scanning people’s faces as they lawfully go about their daily lives, in order to identify them, is a potential threat to privacy that should concern us all. That is especially the case if it is done without people’s knowledge or understanding,” Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham stated.

Cybersecurity

RANSOMWARE STRIKES YET ANOTHER HOSPITAL — Earlier this summer, Grays Harbor Community Hospital and Harbor Medical Group discovered a ransomware attack that encrypted databases containing EHRs, the system announced this week. Patient data including name, date of birth, Social Security numbers, and medical information was affected, but there’s no evidence the data was exposed or accessed by “unauthorized individuals,” according to a statement.

SENATORS PRESS CMS ON NATIONAL PROVIDER IDENTIFIER FRAUD — Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) are pushing CMS for answers on how it ensures the identification numbers that providers use to bill insurers are accurate, following Marshall Allen’s ProPublica and Vox report on a man who exploited the numbers issued through CMS. Health plans and beneficiaries “depend on the validity of federal provider identification systems,” the lawmakers wrote.

...Also on CMS, AGMA, which represents medical groups, offered praise for that agency’s efforts to make patient data more accessible. (In July, we reported on one initiative, which would eventually let clinicians call up their patients’ Medicare claims at the point of care.) “If successful, CMS’ initiatives should inspire commercial insurers to follow suit in data sharing,” AMGA President and CEO Jerry Penso said in a release.

AMA CALLS IT QUITS: The American Medical Association has quit the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, the first crack in the health industry’s opposition to proposals to expand Medicare from 2020 Democratic candidates, our colleagues Dan Diamond and Adam Cancryn scooped on Thursday.

— Why’d the group quit? The industry coalition broadened its opposition this summer from “Medicare for All” to more incremental proposals like former Vice President Joe Biden’s plan for a government-run public option. That didn’t sit well with younger doctors who support Democrats’ ideas and pressured the AMA to leave the group.

— The AMA confirmed its departure. “Missing in the recent debate is an ongoing discussion of practical solutions that will result in more affordable insurance options,” the AMA’s CEO James Madara said in a statement to POLITICO, adding that his association recently laid out proposals to help achieve universal coverage.

Nearly 60 organizations remain members of the Partnership, including the American Hospital Association, PhRMA and AHIP. The industry’s been fighting Medicare expansion for a variety of reasons, including because the government pays lower rates than private insurance.

Health IT Business Watch

A couple of telemedicine-related funding rounds this week:

— Nomad Health, a health care job site that also advertises telemedicine gigs, has raised $34 million in new equity and debt financing, the company announced this week.

— Nurx, which sells prescription drugs including birth control online, has raised $52 million in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Digital Growth Fund and Union Square Ventures.

What We're Reading

— An adoption agency with ties to Betsy DeVos’ family left online highly sensitive medical information about adoptees, including about their physical and psychological development, Vice’s Joseph Cox reports.

— Jocelyn Kaiser delves into Francis Collins’ tenure at NIH for Science.

— Sachin Jain writes about patients’ thank you notes for Harvard Medicine.

— In The New York Times, Brian X. Chen describes how sharing his phone number exposed other parts of his life.

— Brittany Lazur, Andrea Bennett, Valerie King co-authored policy brief for Milbank on telehealth outside the clinical setting.