Apple spreading deeper into Medicare Advantage

With help from Arthur Allen (@arthurallen202) and Mohana Ravindranath (@ravindranize)

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Yet another busy, buzzy day — a pretty consistent theme lately. We’ve got the latest developments here:

— Apple spreading deeper into Medicare Advantage: Apple is pushing its health-enhanced Watch gadgets further into health care, preparing moves into Medicare Advantage. Despite its appeal as a sleek device for the elderly, doctors have some concerns about its effectiveness in health care.

— Verma’s extremely online price transparency push: CMS administrator Seema Verma would like the entire internet’s help in finding — and tweeting about — hospitals that haven’t complied with the agency’s new price transparency rule. We wonder how hospitals will respond to the era of citizen-regulators.

— Dispatches: Meanwhile, POLITICO was roaming about town,and taking the pulse of some noteworthy events — from innovators disappointed by the state of messaging to demands for greater clarity in patient access to their own data.

eHealth tweet of the day: Genevieve Morris @HITpolicywonk “[on Apple bringing its Watch to Medicare Advantage] As the tech support for my parents, cause you know I work in health IT which is totally the same as IT, I’m begging Apple and Medicare not to do this. You have no idea how many hours this will steal from life!”

THURSDAY: Your correspondent does not follow football as closely as he used to — but he has one dear wish: that the Chiefs beat the Patriots on Sunday. (Sorry athenahealth readers! You’re welcome, Cerner readers!) Feel free to root along at [email protected]. Talk sports in a totally novel medium — social media! — at @arthurallen202, @dariustahir, @ravindranize, @POLITICOPro and @Morning_eHealth.

As a new Congress ushers in new legislative priorities, what’s next for health and education? Join POLITICO and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health for a live webcast to discuss the results of an exclusive poll that examines public views on these crucial issues and expectations for the 116th Congress.

APPLE SPREADING DEEPER INTO MEDICARE ADVANTAGE — The newest version of the Apple Watch might have some appeal as an eldercare accessory because it’s sleeker and more discreet than Life Alert. And insurers are starting to take note: Apple has approached three private Medicare plans interested in subsidizing the watch for beneficiaries, according to CNBC.

But doctors tell POLITICO they still aren’t sure how the devices help medical care. They’re worried about being swamped with false positive readings of atrial fibrillation. And they note that the watch simply detects, and doesn’t predict or prevent falls.

Michael Hodgkins, chief information officer at the American Medical Association, urged Apple to “demonstrate both the safety and objectivity” of its alerts, and their ability to cut costs, before aggressively entering the elder care market. “Is it going to create more emergency room visits ... or fewer?” he asked. “It’s not clear to me.” Pros can read the rest of the story here.

SEEMA VERMA’S EXTREMELY ONLINE PRICE TRANSPARENCY PUSH: The CMS administrator is going extremely online in her hunt to find hospitals that haven’t complied with the agency’s new price transparency rule, tweeting Wednesday evening that “[W]e’re asking the Twitterverse to helps us make sure patients have access to the basic hospital pricing information (called the chargemaster) that is now required to be posted online.”

The tweet represents the proverbial stick accompanying the rhetorical carrot. Verma has previously singled out University of Utah Health, University of Colorado Health, and Mayo Clinic as good citizens in her agency’s price transparency push. (She did ask the Twitterverse on Wednesday to share positive examples, which may be a tough lift given that social media only shares happy news related to dogs and Beyonce.)

Verma has repeatedly signaled her intention to push farther into price transparency; indeed, she tweeted a general solicitation of feedback Wednesday as well.

DISPATCHES: POLITICO visited a number of events around town Wednesday. Here are the choicest tidbits:

— POLITICO Live event: At POLITICO’s event convening health care innovators on regulatory barriers, one common disappointment percolated: outdated messaging. “My biggest disappointment is we’ve not yet killed the fax machine,” said Ann Hwang, the director for Community Catalyst’s Center for Consumer Engagement in Health Innovation.

Peter Basch, of MedStar Health, echoed Hwang’s critique, saying he was “surprised” by the lack of progress on secure direct messaging. “I was expecting all clinicians in all systems would be communicating in this way” by now, he said.

— Health IT Now: Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.) dropped by Health IT Now’s interoperability-themed Hill briefing Wednesday to highlight topics he thought Congress should be grappling with, including medical record ownership and patient identifiers.

Bera, a physician, said Congress should clarify how much authority and ownership patients have over their own records, and what aspects of a patient’s information can be held by a health system. The same question applies to data generated by consumer health trackers like the Apple Watch, he said later.

Following a quick interoperability update from ONC’s Elise Sweeney Anthony (the information blocking rule is still at OMB, and she still can’t share what’s in the rule other than it’s “ commonsense” Bera added that patient identifiers linking disparate records could ease the transfer of information, but that the concept is often associated with “big government.”

GENE EDITING TAKES OVER NEJM: In the wake of the He Jiankui scandal — in which a rogue Chinese scientist announced he had gene-edited embryos — the New England Journal of Medicine is dominated by reckoning with the aftermath.

— Optimistic pessimism: The first article, by a trio of researchers hailing from institutions ranging from Harvard to Universite Paris, acknowledges all of the concerns brought up by critics – that such research on humans is reckless, that it might lead to inequality if the wealthy get access to the best of gene editing, and that demand for boundary-pushing therapies is high. Still, they conclude, humanity’s understanding may be too puny to do much damage: “In the long run, our greatest protection against inappropriate genome editing may be the implausibility of influencing traits such as intelligence, which emerge from complex interactions among multiple genes and environments. Our ignorance regarding such complexity may ultimately save us from the hazards of humanity’s hubris.”

— Regulation: A second article, from a University of Wisconsin, Madison law professor, argues that regulations are not enough. “[A]s has been seen in the rise of businesses selling unproven, often illegal stem-cell ‘therapies’ for everything from neurologic disease to stiff knees, top-down regulation has its limitations and cannot completely control the rogues,” the author wrote. “Regulating rogues may well take more than a central agency that grants or denies permission for the sale or use of a product or technique.”

— Culture: Finally, Lisa Rosenbaum considers a more general societal impact — noting that the successful advent of gene editing may lead to the further stigmatization of social difference.

CONGRESSIONAL SHUFFLING CONTINUES: Committee rosters are continuing to shuffle in the opening days of the new Congress. The Ways and Means Health Subcommittee will be chaired by Lloyd Doggett, while its oversight subcommittee will be chaired by John Lewis; the ranking member of the health subcommittee will be Devin Nunes.

Meanwhile, Rep. Will Hurd — a noted cybersecurity aficionado — will serve on the House Appropriations Committee. A press release touting the Texan’s selection specifically cites cybersecurity as a priority.

ALL OF US ENLISTING FITBIT: The All of Us genetic research project announced its intention to let participants use Fitbit shared data. The data will be pooled along with surveys, medical records, and biosamples to give researchers a broader picture into participants’ lives.

BIZ NEWS: Heal, an app-based house call service, announced that former Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs and Florida governor Jeb Bush would join the startup’s board of directors … Ciitizen, a company building a service helping patients collect and share their health data, raised $17 million Wednesday. … Microsoft is touting a job opening for a software engineer focused on FHIR.

WHAT WE’RE CLICKING ON:

Data researcher Fred Trotter dives into the Office for Civil Right’s HIPAA enforcement numbers. (They’ve been declining, Trotter argues.)

A summary of OCR’s HIPAA request for information in blog form.

GoFundMe’s CEO confirms that about a third of the funding provided through its site is for health care.