Hearing: Health at Your Fingertips: Harnessing the Power of Digital Health Data

Wednesday, June 25, 2025 | 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM ET

On June 25, 2025, the Health Subcommittee of the U.S. House Committee on Ways & Means held a hearing to discuss how digital health data and tools can improve care delivery and outcomes while examining some of the barriers to implementation.

Hearing Page & Recording

Speakers

• Dr. Kristen Holmes, Global Head of Human Performance and Principal Scientist, WHOOP
  • Written Testimony here
• Josh Phelps, President, Winchester Metals Inc.
  • Written Testimony here
• Andrew Zengilowski, CEO and Co-Founder, CoachCare
  • Written Testimony here
• Dr. Jackie Gerhart, MD, Chief Medical Officer and VP of Clinical Informatics, Epic Systems
  • Written Testimony here
• Sabrina Corlette, Research Professor and Co-Director of Center on Health Insurance Reforms, Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy
  • Written Testimony here

Remote Patient Monitoring

• Digital health innovation, particularly remote patient monitoring (RPM), is transforming how patients and providers manage chronic conditions. Witnesses emphasized that RPM enables physicians to receive continuous, population-level data to monitor trends and intervene earlier. They highlighted RPM’s role in reducing hospital readmissions, improving treatment adherence, and managing conditions like diabetes, hypertension, and obesity by incentivizing behavior changes by giving patients access to their own health information.
• RPM can reduce high-cost interventions but rising costs for devices and labor and Medicare cuts have made it harder for some providers to offer these services. Medicare’s location-based reimbursement rates disproportionately affect small, privately-owned practices in rural and underserved areas, even though the cost of RPM is the same everywhere. A potential solution is Rep. David Kustoff’s (R-TN.) RPM Access Act.
• Rep. Blake Moore (R-UT) and Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY) emphasized the need to expand Health Savings Account (HSA) eligibility to more groups of people to improve access to RPM. There are attempts to get these provisions in the “one big beautiful bill.”
• While medical-grade RPM devices require FDA clearance, Medicare coverage often lags by 5-6 years. Rep. Moore said he plans to introduce legislation to create a clearer path to coverage and urged the Trump administration to reinstate the Medicare Coverage of Innovative Technologies (MCIT) rule, which expedited Medicare coverage for FDA-designated breakthrough devices.

Data Privacy

• Several lawmakers questioned how digital health companies protect patient data. Mr. Zengilowski noted that his company signs business associate agreements with all providers they partner with and operates under HIPAA. He added that while the average Medicare reimbursement for RPM is about $45, CoachCare invests roughly $10 per patient per month on information security, emphasizing the significant investment involved.

Interoperability

• Epic was questioned about its progress in sharing data with other EHR vendors like Oracle.
• Gerhart responded that Epic exchanges over 700 million patient records each month and half involve non-epic EHR systems.
• She highlighted that over 750 apps used Epic’s APIs to help patients retrieve health data and that Epic customers were able to respond to more than 111 billion interoperability calls with third-party apps.
• Dr. Gerhart urged Congress to extend HIPAA to cover all entities handling health data.
• Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) argued that HIPAA may already go too far in restricting how providers can share health information.

Artificial Intelligence

• Witnesses emphasized that using AI for administrative tasks such as clinical notetaking and documentation has had a significant impact on reducing clinician burnout. By automating routine work, these tools free up more time for providers to focus on patients, improving the patient experience as well.
• AI is helping drive an era of personalized health that empowers individuals to become “CEOs of their own health,” according to Dr. Kristen Holmes. She discussed how WHOOP uses AI to analyze daily behaviors like sleep or heart rate to deliver real-time insights and personalized coaching. These tools support long-term wellness and early detection of health risks while also giving users more control over their health decisions.
• Dr. Gerhart noted that AI can help streamline prior authorization by quickly searching through health records to collect relevant information for insurers, reducing delays to care and more administrative burden.