October 22, 2020
Maverick's Update
Only What Matters On Health Information Policy
Maverick Health Policy noticed a big announcement from CommonWell Alliance, the national health data network for provider systems, that it is doing an interoperability pilot for payers -- testing payment and health care operations use cases with Janine Akers’ DataFile Exchange -- with four companies that offer record retrieval services: Change Healthcare, Ciox, Inovalon, and Moxe Health. So that seems like a big deal. Three other items for you:
On October 21, ONC held a meeting of the Health IT Advisory Committee -- materials can be found here. What it means to have patient-centered data was a topic of discussion - see Recommendation #7. Feedback can be submitted here.
Stanford announced the launch of the Community Alliance to Test Coronavirus at Home (CATCH) Study, utilizing online surveys and home delivered self-collection kits using the Vera Cloud Testing Platform which “continuously aggregates test results and data about symptoms” to study COVID-19 prevalence in real-time. While very cool, this is only exciting if you live in San Francisco.
Tyto Care launched an at-home diagnosis tool that will detect abnormalities in lung exams and detect symptoms in throat exams during virtual visits.
One Thoughtful Paragraph
Last week, Maverick Health Policy celebrated the savvy states and cities that are collaborating with The Rockefeller Foundation to collect and analyze data to help stop the COVID-19 virus from spreading. So why doesn’t some tech-savvy institution build a centralized, national database? Must be too hard with the fragmented American health care system…unless your name is Melissa Haendel. According to a nice write-up in The Verge, Dr. Haendel started the National COVID Cohort Collaborative Data Enclave, or N3C, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a “national data resource that will turn data into the knowledge that is urgently needed to address the COVID-19 pandemic.” Nearly 70 institutions have started the process to contribute data to the enclave, allowing data from different electronic health record systems to be harmonized and making a centralized resource available for collaborative research. Overcoming technical, regulatory, policy, and governance barriers, N3C is able collect patient-level clinical data on thousands of COVID-19 cases in a secure environment to make transparent and reproducible collaborative research possible. The Enclave even has a help desk. Scientific data nerds rock.