July 29, 2022
Maverick's Update
Only What Matters In Health Information Policy
“It's just another Thursday.” That’s one of several witty remarks in the new movie The Gray Man, which means “this might be challenging for a regular person, but for our hero, it is just a typical day.” Our hero, in this case, is a CIA operative played by Ryan Gosling, who manages to uncover dark agency secrets, which triggers a psychopathic former CIA agent played by Chris Evans (who sports a terrible mustache in an attempt to shake the whole Captain America thing) to try to kill our hero to recover the secrets. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph below, we explain how it is not just another Thursday in the world of digital health policy.
Other news that happened around Thursday of this week:
The Purchaser Business Group on Health and Integrated Healthcare Association are leading a value-based care model with a small group of participants, including Aetna, Aledade, Oscar, and UnitedHealthcare. The companies signed a memorandum of understanding, agreeing to prioritize advanced primary care by expanding data collection and exchange to support value-based payments.
The ONC announced a new Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) Trust Fund project titled “Using Machine Learning Techniques to Enable Health Information Exchange to Support COVID-19 Focused PCOR.” The project will initially incorporate split learning, a privacy-preserving machine learning technique to test the possibility of incorporating HIE data for research at the individual and widespread HIE level.
The NIH All of Us research program issued a Request for Information on integrating EHR data from health information networks and exchanges into its currently existing data set.
One Thoughtful Paragraph
Unlike the villain in the movie The Gray Man who sports a "trash-'stache," Senator Todd Young of Indiana is totally clean-shaven. Senator Young is the long-time champion of a bill that just passed Congress that will be a game-changer in the American manufacturing of technology. He is the hero of the United States Innovation and Competition Act, which morphed into the “chips and science” bill, that just passed both chambers of Congress with bipartisan support. As we reported more than one year ago, this important legislation will not only allow the United States to manufacture its own computer chips (rather than relying on China’s manufacturing) that allows modern-day-living to be modern for cars, phones, and fridges, it will be an incredible new burst of research and STEM-focused education on emerging technologies for all industries. For the still-trying-to-modernize health care industry, this is a game-changer. It means whole teams of our smartest science, engineering and technology nerds will be dedicated to learning how technology can help drive innovation in health care -- including artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation, robotics, biotech, medical technology, genomics, synthetic biology, data storage and management, and cybersecurity -- all of which are listed in the official “initial list of key technology focus areas” in the bill. There is no way that Senator Young, who got very little recognition for spearheading legislation (that was first and more appropriately called the “Endless Frontier Act”) thought that yesterday was just another Thursday.