From Washington Info blocking ban could get teeth soon
The federal government's health IT office proposed new rules on Monday to penalize providers caught violating the government's information blocking regulations — a long awaited step that could give the years-long ban on interfering with data sharing regulatory teeth, Casey Ross writes.
Under the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT's proposal, hospitals and other providers would lose government payments meant to support the use of record keeping software. And if they're part of an accountable care organization, providers could also be banned from getting payments under Medicare's shared savings program.
The new proposals are meant to put the finishing touches on ONC's effort to crack down on the hoarding of highly-valuable health data. Patients want easy electronic access to the data to get the most effective care, and health IT developers need to tap the information to build more useful artificial intelligence tools to warn of emerging health problems.
What the AI executive order means for health tech
The tech and policy worlds are buzzing about President Biden's wide ranging artificial intelligence executive order, though it's too early to tell whether it'll actually offer robust guardrails against pitfalls like bias and discrimination.
Unveiled Monday, the White House executive order also directed the federal government's health departments to come up with a plan for regulating AI commonly found in hospitals, within health plan administration, and other health businesses, Casey writes. More specifically, The Health and Human Services Department must create a safety program collecting reports of unsafe and harmful AI-related practices.
Casey has reported widely on ways AI currently makes consequential decisions about patients' care, including algorithms denying Medicare patients payment for serious illnesses, among others. Read more from Casey on the executive order and what it means.
Want more AI news? Check out STAT's Generative AI Tracker, a handy tool that you can use to to keep an eye on the real-world cases of generative AI being used by health systems.
Telehealth
Retailers flood the virtual care market
A flurry of retailers have launched virtual care businesses that let patients seek treatment for conditions like hair loss and ear infections by paying cash — not insurance — and texting or video-chatting with providers, Katie Palmer writes. The growth of cash-pay businesses could give patients more choice, but could also fuel confusion.
Costco, for instance, is partnering with Sesame to offer virtual visits for as low as $29 to members, and Walgreens plans to launch its own direct-to-consumer cash pay business in 9 states in the coming weeks, among others.
Many of these companies are primarily interested in "Can we offer the kinds of services that are cheap enough to provide that we don't have to worry about going to insurers?" Alexander Lennox-Miller, lead analyst in healthcare IT at CB Insights, told Katie. By tapping into a population of patients who just routinely need efficient access to medication, which providers can offer virtually, they don't have to pay to build physical clinics, Lennox-Miller said. Read more from Katie here.
A mixed bag on telehealth and quality data
A new study out in JAMA Health Forum suggests — in one limited setting — what some virtual care advocates have feared: That telemedicine for some serious mental illness patients during the pandemic led to more visits, but not necessarily better care. In this analysis of about 120,000 patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, the ones at practices that went entirely virtual had 13% more visits than the patients at clinics that still relied on in-person care, but demonstrated no changes in other quality metrics like medication adherence or emergency department use. The study highlights yet another fact in the debate about whether virtual care actually improves patients' health, and whether it can ratchet up costs by driving up the number of appointments, but researchers are far from coming to any definitive conclusions.
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