US Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell announced today at HIMSS16 in Las Vegas a new joint commitment from a number of healthcare providers and health IT companies to make patients’ data more accessible, which includes a move to implement new interoperability standards.
The list of groups committed to the cause includes companies that provide 90 percent of the EHRs in the United...
The HHS Office for Civil Rights has published additional guidance on its mHealth Developer Portal that provides developers with different scenarios in which HIPAA might apply to the data their app collects.
“We hope these new scenarios will help developers determine how federal regulations might apply to products they are building; we also hope they will reduce some of the uncertainty that can be...
Michael Millenson
There appears to be a broad consensus that patient-centeredness is important to the future of healthcare, according to a new report from the Urban Institute. But peeking under the surface of that apparent consensus reveals that the term means many things to many people, and that not all patient-centric initiatives are complementary.
"While the umbrella term 'patient-centered...
HHS appoints Susannah Fox as CTO: Just two weeks after our last hiring roundup, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it had appointed longtime patient advocate and Pew Research alum Susannah Fox as its new CTO. Fox has also been an early and important voice in the emerging mobile and digital health. Her team's work at Pew helped ground the mobile health discussion with...
A recent study conducted by Mathematica Policy Research and Public Health Institute found that Text4baby subscribers are engaged with the texting program, would recommend it to others, and have gained knowledge about critical maternal and child health topics after using it.
The report was produced for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Health Resources and Services...
This week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would follow up its Pioneer Accountable Care Organization (ACO) Model with a new, Next Generation ACO Model. ACOs operating under the new model will take on more risk than their predecessors, potentially share more savings, and will have greater freedom to be reimbursed for telemedicine.
“The Next Generation ACO Model is one...
Last week, as part of its Health IT week, the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT announced that it had hired Lana Moriarty as its new acting director of consumer e-health. Moriarty steps into the shoes of Lygeia Ricciardi, who departed in July after holding the office for three and a half years, during which the bulk of the work was done on the ONC's Blue Button project for consumer...
Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA) and Rep. Peter Defazio (D-OR) sent a letter to US Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Sylvia Burwell asking her to help make HIPAA regulatory guidance clearer for app developers.
The congressmen wrote the letter a few days after ACT — The App Association and a number of its mobile health company members sent a letter to Marino encouraging him to do so.
In the...
Last week the Senate Finance Committee sent letters (PDF) to a wide assortment of healthcare stakeholders to source input on how the federal government could improve "the availability and utility of health care data" so that patients could more easily shop for doctors that suit their needs, providers could deliver higher quality care, and payers could design more effective care delivery models....
Teladoc was one of the many signatories on one of the letters recently sent to incoming HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell.
After efforts to remove restrictions from CMS coverage of telehealth through legislative channels have stalled, telehealth stakeholders have sent a barrage of open letters to incoming US Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell, urging her to use her newfound...
