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Jan 18

HHS’ 5-year IT plan and other notes from HITAC – Politico

Exercise Programs Comments Off on HHS’ 5-year IT plan and other notes from HITAC – Politico

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

PROGRAMMING NOTE: Morning eHealth will not be published on Monday, Jan. 20. We'll be back on our normal schedule on Wednesday, Jan. 22.

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Editor's Note: This edition of Morning eHealth is published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 10 a.m. POLITICO Pro eHealth subscribers hold exclusive early access to the newsletter each morning at 6 a.m. Learn more about POLITICO Pro's comprehensive policy intelligence coverage, policy tools and services at politicopro.com.

HHS five-year IT plan and other notes from HITAC: Competition, APIs and patient privacy were all in the mix at the in-person gathering of ONC's advisory committee this week.

Warner probes unsecured medical images from military centers: The Virginia Democrat detailed his concerns about the Defense Health Agency's cybersecurity practices.

Do we need a Human Screenome Project? If you'd be willing to let a software system take snapshots of your online activity every five seconds, this group of researchers probably wants to hear from you.

eHealth tweet of the day, in response to this Advisory Board analysis of CancerSurvivalRates.com, which tells patients how likely they are to survive various types of cancer: Jay Hancock @jayhancock1 "Disagree this is a defect: 'The website doesn't provide any detail or explanation on how other factors, such as diet and exercise, may impact a prognosis.' Simplicity a virtue. Plus -- is research on effect of diet & exercise on diagnosed cancer ready for prime time?"

Its FRIDAY at Morning eHealth, where your author got a press pitch about custom VR experiences designed for individual hospice patients. Has anyone seen this in action? Tips go to mravindranath@politico.com. Tweet the team at @arthurallen202, @dariustahir, @ravindranize, @POLITICOPro and @Morning_eHealth.

HHS' HEALTH IT PLAN UNVEILED ONC's draft five-year plan outlines broad goals for federal agencies that invest in health IT among them, encouraging patient access to data and competition among vendors. The agency released the proposal on Thursday, coinciding with a meeting of its Health Information Technology Advisory Committee.

Peter Karras, ONC's strategic plan lead, told HITAC that the plan is intentionally broad. "You won't see implementation [guidelines] for specific programs," he said. Instead, it highlights general functions that agencies can aim to fulfill.

... What's in it: Aside from nudging agencies to improve patients' access to their health data, the draft also encourages them to support population-level health data transfer to researchers and public health groups, among many other objectives. It's intended for agencies that use EHRs to actually care for patients and who use them for research, as well as any who offer health IT grants.

The plan could "open up entirely new business models throughout the health app economy," says the draft; one aim is to promote "pro-competitive business practices" that let patients "easily use and choose from multiple validated health apps and other health IT tools without special effort."

In a nod to recent debates about potential downsides to data sharing, the plan promotes "secure health information that protects patient privacy." One strategy might be helping patients understand their data and what can be done with it "so they can make informed decisions about data exchange and secondary uses of their data," it says.

... What's not in the draft: The document doesn't offer guidance about which of the priorities to, well, prioritize, one health executive points out. It articulates major challenges and proffers general ideas for addressing them, but doesn't clarify which of those challenges the agencies should focus on, Matthew Michela, president and CEO of Life Image, a network for exchanging medical images, told Morning eHealth. "[T]here are those that would have more immediate impact or would accelerate progress on other objectives if they were addressed first.

The public comment period on the draft runs through March 18.

BACK TO HITAC It was a buzzy meeting Wednesday as members and ONC officials speculated about the impact of upcoming HHS rules, now under OMB review, to free up patient data. As expected, privacy was the topic du jour. ONC head Don Rucker reiterated his belief that giving patients full control over their own data will let them shop around more. ONC and HITAC must balance privacy protections with the fact that "the public ... is not served well by the way health care has evolved over the last 50 years," he said.

NIH DRAFT DATA POLICY: TOO SLOW OR JUST RIGHT? Critics say a draft National Institutes of Health policy encouraging grantees to share research data fails to embrace the future of technology. Others say it's a sensible step forward, Darius writes.

... The draft would require researchers to submit their plans for data management and sharing on a just-in-time basis, which means they submit those plans after getting a good score on their initial grant application. Bill Hersh, the chair of Oregon Health and Science Universitys department of medical informatics and clinical epidemiology, says he worries the just-in-time decision will downgrade the policys importance. Therell probably be boilerplate language [on data-sharing] people develop, he predicted, saying he thinks reviewers wont take the data-sharing element as seriously since it comes late in the process.

Other groups think the policy wisely takes it slow. Its a heavy lift that theyre taking on, said Heather Pierce, senior director of science policy at the Association of American Medical Colleges. Pierce says the policy doesnt include strong mandates, but that it's a good thing. No one really knows yet what an effective data-management plan looks like, she said.

SPOT CHECK ON PENTAGON'S CYBER HYGIENE In his latest inquiry into health cybersecurity, Sen. Mark Warner cited Fort Belvoir Medical Center, Ireland Army Health Clinic and the Womack Army Medical Center for leaving sensitive medical information accessible to anyone with the right technology, Darius reports. Warner asked the Defense Health Agency whether it requires hospitals to have chief information security officers and to describe their cyber practices, such as audit logs.

... Warner had previously sent letters to TridentUSA Health Services, an image-storage firm, and HHS following ProPublica's report on the vulnerability; he alleged then that the two had ignored reports of the problem. Since that inquiry, Warner wrote this week, 31 million images have been removed from the internet. But others remain, including from those three military medical centers, he wrote.

MAYBE SCREENTIME'S NOT SO BAD? A group of researchers are calling for very detailed research about exactly what online activities might harm consumers well-being, including their social media, news and ad consumption, they said in a comment to Nature this week.

Policymakers and public health groups have warned of the negative effects of digital media, but many studies on the topic rely on consumers' self-reporting of their screentime, instead of describing exactly what they were doing and for how long, Byron Reeves, Thomas Robinson and Nilam Ram wrote.

[T]ime spent on Facebook could involve finding out what your friends are doing, attending a business meeting, shopping, fundraising, reading a news article, bullying, even stalking someone, authors wrote. These are vastly different activities that are likely to have very different effects on a persons health and behaviour.

They called for a broad research effort a Human Screenome Project to record everything participants do and see on their devices, such as reading about politics, researching their health, or having personal conversations. Theyve already collected more than 30 million screenshots from more than 600 people, using software they developed.

... In the world of the human genome, Germany has joined the EUs One Million Genomes Initiative, along with 20 other EU countries and Norway, committed to linking genomic health datasets, our colleague Carmen Paun reports. The 22 countries aim to give researchers access to 1 million sequenced genomes by 2022.

Genomic data management and interoperability is ever more important in health care, but we still need to establish standard methods and tools, said EU Research Commissioner Mariya Gabriel.

CMMI GETS NEW TECH CHIEF Shannon Sartin, who led the HHS-focused branch of the White House tech team the U.S. Digital Service, will start a new role next week as chief technology officer at CMMI, she announced in a blog post today. Her USDS team oversaw various Medicare data projects including the Data at the Point of Care pilot, which allows clinicians at participating hospitals to download patients claims information.

GOODRICH, SIDDIQUI TO LEAVE FOR HUMANA HHS chief data officer Mona Siddiqui is leaving her post next week to become a senior vice president at Humana, making her the second senior HHS official the Louisville-based insurer has announced hiring in the past month. Kate Goodrich, chief medical officer of CMS, will leave in February to become a senior vice president at Humana, POLITICO's Dan Diamond and Adam Cancryn scooped.

Patients are using video platform TikTok to raise money for medical bills, Jacey Fortin writes for The New York Times.

Harvard's Jessica Fjeld, Nele Achten, Hannah Hilligoss, Adam Nagy and Madhulika Srikumar author a report on "Principled Artificial Intelligence."

CORRECTION: A previous version of Morning eHealth misstated Mona Siddiqui's new position at Humana. She will be senior vice president.

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HHS' 5-year IT plan and other notes from HITAC - Politico

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