“What was once yours is once again mine.” This may be what President Trump told former President G.W. Bush this week after announcing at a White House event that the “dream of easily transportable electronic records is a reality” – which is what George W. Bush first announced in his 2004 State of the Union address. It is also a line from the classic film Raiders of the Lost Ark, spoken by the rival archaeologist to our hero, Indiana Jones, about the Ark of the Covenant, which Jones had briefly possessed before Belloq and the Nazis seized it. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph below, we discuss one old-but-new policy that is popping in the health technology space.
Other old-but-new news this week:
- Sixty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Social Security Act, issuing the first Medicare card despite industry concern labelling the program as socialized medicine. Today, it represents 32% of total healthcare spending. Read more in an analysis by Paul Keckley.
- Over 200 healthcare organizations sent a letter to the newly confirmed DEA Administrator, urging him to establish a permanent plan for the regulation of controlled substance prescribing via telehealth before current flexibilities expire at the end of the year. The Biden administration proposed a special registration pathway and oversight measures for controlled substance telehealth prescribers, but there was significant pushback about it. Read more in a JAMA Health Forum viewpoint article.
- ASTP/ONC published the 6th version of the United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI v6), with new elements such as family health history and unique device identifier (UDI). The UDI element was expanded to include all medical devices.
What does the diary tell you that it doesn’t tell us? [The Nazi tries to slap our hero’s father, played by the great Sean Connery, but he grabs the Nazi’s wrist, stopping him, and says through his teeth]: It tells me, that goose-stepping morons like yourself should try *reading* books instead of *burning* them! Hahahaha. I love that line from another Indiana Jones movie, The Last Crusade. For our purposes, the “diary” is the annual hospital inpatient payment rule, which we read, because we are not goose-stepping morons. Tucked in the diary (at about p. 1,559) are some new rules about electronic prescribing, real-time prescription benefit checks, and electronic prior authorization. The prior auth criteria will, according to our Indiana Jones heroes, “allow providers to use certified health IT to request information from payers about coverage requirements; navigate and assemble the information needed to support a prior authorization request; submit that request directly from their certified health IT system; and, monitor the status of a request.” During a week where all sorts of health tech promises were made by CMS at a splashy White House event, the ASTP/ONC team gets real with a FINAL rule about providers using their electronic health record systems to streamline prior authorization processes. You got to hand it to these 21st Century Cures Act guys – they just keep showing up. It is like what Indiana Jones says in the Last Crusade: I’m like a bad penny, I always turn up.
