| The skinny
This month, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced the first wave of tools and partnerships under its Health Tech Ecosystem initiative — including the novel Medicare App Library — which seeks to create a more consumer-driven, app-based health data infrastructure. Under the initiative, patient data doesn’t stay siloed within individual apps. Instead, participating companies connect to CMS-backed data-sharing networks — including health information exchanges and interoperability frameworks — that allow data to flow directly into clinicians’ workflows. That means information generated by platforms like Welldoc or Noom, two companies participating in the Medicare App Library, can be accessed alongside clinical data, rather than requiring patients to manually share it. A new kind of effort
Kristen Valdes, CEO of b.well Connected Health, thinks CMS is right in its thinking that healthcare needs to abandon document-based exchange in favor of real-time, patient-mediated data access. It’s not as if digital data exchange networks or shared interoperability standards are new innovations — but now CMS is starting to go beyond voluntary alignment and quietly incentivizing participation, she explained. Effectively, the role of interoperability networks is changing from optional infrastructure to a required participation point for companies if they want meaningful access to Medicare-connected patients and data flow. CMS is now pushing for “CMS-aligned networks” — in which patients’ data access requests are no longer treated as a secondary use case, but as a mandatory requirement that participants must support by default, Valdes noted. Providing better care
Without continuous data, providers give more generic advice, pointed out Anand Iyer, chief AI officer at Welldoc. With real-time data, he said they can provide clinical coaching that is much more personalized. Iyer noted integrating with b.well’s continuous data platform and participating in CMS-aligned networks is giving Welldoc’s clinicians the information they need to provide step-by-step guidance rather than blanket advice — “the Google Maps of healthcare,” as he put it. “If your hemoglobin A1C is 10, and you want it to become seven, okay? Let's say that you’ve gotten it down to nine, and you still need to get it down to eight and seven, but I don't have that data flow through from my lab. What do I tell the patient? Well, I can tell them, keep on exercising, keep on eating healthy. I can give them general feedback, like a health and wellness app would do, but I'm not giving them the precise turn-by-turn directions,” he explained. — By Katie Adams |
No comments