| | | |  By Casey Ross, Katie Palmer, Mario Aguilar, and Mohana Ravindranath | | | Lawmakers eye longer telehealth off-ramp In what could net a win for telehealth advocates worried about an abrupt end to coverage for virtual care, Congress is considering extending pandemic-era telehealth flexibilities for five months after the public health emergency period formally ends. The temporary policies have allowed tens of millions of Medicare beneficiaries to access video and audio health appointments during the pandemic.
The potential flexibility, part of draft text obtained by Rachel Cohrs, isn’t yet final and could change as Congress races to complete its funding bill by the end of the week. It’s also not yet clear when HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra will formally end the public health emergency: While the current period will end in April, Washington-watchers expect at least one 90-day extension. Our colleague Rachel Cohrs has more. | Feds face mounting pressure on info blocking. Complaints of providers and health IT vendors blocking health data sharing are piling up in Washington. The majority of information blocking complaints have been leveled against providers since the ban on interfering with data sharing took effect last year, according to a report from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, the agency that fields those claims. (Almost 200 complaints — against providers, health IT developers and others —came from patients directly.) But there still isn’t a clear process for how those complaints will be investigated or how penalties will be levied. Two other HHS offices are tasked, separately, with enforcing the ban for providers and for health IT developers and health information exchanges.
Now, former officials are calling on regulators to act faster and share more intel about the complaints they’re seeing, so providers can shore up their data sharing. The agency’s initial report, former deputy national coordinator of health IT Jacob Reider told STAT, is “like the police department describing the quality, sources, and suspects of 9-1-1 calls…It's interesting but doesn't really tell us much about whether crime is being committed and by whom, and how we might prevent such crimes.” Mohana has more. | Telehealth isn’t so easy if you don’t speak English “I had to call like eight times one time to reach the patient. When we use the interpreter language line, if they call the patient, that comes up as a 1–800 number. Many patients don't like to pick up. I don't either. I don't blame them.” The quick switch to telehealth has been touted as one of the great victories of the pandemic, but an underexplored dimension of that transition is how it went for people who don’t speak English proficiently. A new study from researchers at the University of California documents what the experience was like for patients and staff from two federally qualified health centers that primarily serve Chinese and Latino immigrants. Among the findings: language interpretation services were hard to use in telemedicine video visits, and audio-only appointments were preferable for older patients. That raises another issue highlighted by the quote above, from a physician interviewed for the study. | The future of healthcare, powered by PINC AI™ Harness the power of AI, data, and insight — and do it all in one place. PINC AI™ is the intuitive platform that combines extensive data and robust technology with some of the country’s most experienced healthcare consultants. This unique combination of intelligent solutions is built to give you better, sustainable results. Learn more. | Precision targeting for Covid study participants? In a preprint article published this week, researchers offered a potentially cheaper and more efficient way to recruit participants for Covid-19 studies: Finding the highest risk people, instead of just casting a wide net. Through a partnership with health app Evidation, which offers users rewards for sharing their data for clinical research, researchers recruited people who demonstrated higher individual risk of Covid-19 exposure, based on socioeconomic and behavioral data combined with local prevalence rates. Precision recruitment could help researchers reduce their sample sizes or shorten the trial length, they wrote. | Cleveland Clinic's Path.AI deal and more news - PathAI, which last year announced it had raised $165 million to advance its AI tools for pathology, has a new 5-year partnership with Cleveland Clinic. PathAI will gain access to an expanded pathology and clinical dataset to further its algorithm development and Cleveland Clinic will get slide digitization services and an equity stake in the company.
- GoodRx announced it will acquire vitaCare Prescription Services, which provides pharmacy services, for $150 million.
- Jennifer Schneider, the former president and chief medical officer of Livongo, announced her new company Homeward, which aims to provide primary and specialty care to underserved rural populations. The company launched this week with the announcement of a $20 million from General Catalyst plus a handful of other Livongo veterans in tow.
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