“The curious fish gets caught.” This is a good thing for journalists to keep in mind tonight, as they weigh whether they should go to the rescheduled Washington Correspondent’s Association Dinner. It is also a line from Luca, the Pixar/Disney coming-of-age film set on the Italian Riviera. I picked this movie for today’s blog post because it is a fantasy about a sea monster who masquerades as a human and has an exciting summer in a beautiful setting – which sounds pretty great right now. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph, I talk about a health policy that seems to be masquerading as something it’s not.
No sea monsters were harmed in the reporting of this week’s news:
- Maverick Health Policy and Longyear Health launched their ACCESS Collaborative this week, with over 100 organizations expressing interest in the inaugural webinar. While we ramp up, we noticed that Dexcom will be the first company to participate in the FDA’s Technology-Enabled Meaningful Patient Outcomes (TEMPO) for Digital Health Devices Pilot. Dexcom will offer its Glucose Health Program to patients participating in CMMI’s ACCESS Model, helping to monitor metabolic and nutritional status, receive tailored health advice, and screen prediabetes and type II diabetes.
- Three little-noticed health AI announcements that are actually worth noticing: The Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI) released five health AI policy recommendations; The Peterson Health Technology Institute’s Payment for Clinical AI report said that if AI is going to be a cost-saver, then we need to re-think our reimbursement models; and the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Health launched an AI accelerator program with Kleiner Perkins and Doerr Capital that encourages AI companies to build solutions alongside clinicians, patients, and health systems.
- The EHIgnite Challenge, an Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) competition to create solutions that improve the usability of electronic health information exports, announced nine Phase 1 winners. For Phase 2, which will conclude in March 2027, the selected organizations will turn their proposals into actual tools and compete for a $400,000 prize pool.
“Rules are for rule people.” This is what a confident, free-spirited sea monster says to help his friend, Luca, brush off those irritating societal norms holding him back. It also seems to be the theme of this summer’s proposed Physician Fee Schedule. Yes, the newly released 2027 Physician Fee Schedule proposed rule includes plenty for the “rule people” about how much CMS is going to pay doctors who participate in Medicare. But buried in this otherwise ordinary document are a few sea monsters lurking: CMS is using broad Requests for Information to evaluate how data sharing, health IT systems, and diagnostic interoperability could be better embedded into value-based care and primary care payment models. It’s floating ways to integrate AI into clinical workflows. There is a whole section on scaling back remote patient monitoring to combat bad actors. And the biggest sea monster-fantasy-like section is an RFI seeking evidence of “AMA’s monopoly over CPT-4 licenses” and asking for ideas about a different way to pay for medical services. Ambitious much? It is like when another character tries to embolden our hero in Luca: “There’s a million things you think you can’t do. All you need is a chance to try.”
