Washington Debrief: Senate Bill Calls for More Medicare Data Transparency

HHS Moves Ahead with Plans to Build National Research Network for Patient-Center Outcomes Nearly $200 million was made available in the Affordable Care Act to support the development of an interoperable data infrastructure for patient-centered outcomes research.  The Office of the National Coordinator and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) recently announced a partnership to begin this work.  ONC and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation will work with PCORI to craft data-sharing policies, standards and services.  “We want to work alongside PCORI to ensure that we help lay the foundations for their discoveries to be nationally scalable as quickly and effectively as possible,” an ONC spokesman said. A presentation by Joe Selby, M.D., described the work being planned to the Health IT Policy Committee last week.  Dr. Selby described how PCORI has made two funding announcements totaling $68 million to inform two types of national patient-centered clinical research networks: a Clinical Data Research Network (CDRN) and Patient-Powered Research Networks.  “The proposed network would unite patients, researchers and healthcare systems and support rapid, effective observational and interventional studies with active participation from a broad patient population,” Selby said.  The “network of networks” approach envisions a steering committee composed of PCORI awardees, PCORI, AHRQ, NIH, FDA, ONC, CMS and the VA.

ONC Releases New Data on Hospital and EP Attestation The Office of the National Coordinator unveiled some interesting data last week.  Since December 2012 industry observers had few data points on how many eligible hospitals and eligible professionals had actually met the task of attesting to Meaningful Use.  The best that could be done was looking at the published list of facilities and EPs, maintained by CMS, and then apply industry-standard estimates on the population of EHs and EPs.  This week, however, ONC gave members of the Health IT Policy Committee a “data analytics” update that included numbers of Meaningful Users as of April 2013.  Some 60 percent of EHs have attested to Meaningful Use with another 19 percent having received Medicaid payments for “Adopt, Implement, or Upgrading” to an EHR.  On the EP side, 43 percent have attested to Stage 1 meaningful use and an additional 21 percent have been paid under Medicaid for AIU.  The ONC update also presents information on how EHs and EPs have fared in meeting each objective.  Sizable majorities of EHs scored above 90 percent in meeting individual measure thresholds (slide 15).  Additional updates were given by CMS and the S&I Framework, which continues its standard-setting work in a dozen different initiatives.

CHIME Outstanding Service Award now open!  This award recognizes a CHIME member CIO who has shown outstanding dedication to the CHIME organization as evidenced by participation in CHIME’s programs and through volunteer service.  Nominate a colleague or apply today.

Coming soon: CHIME State Public Policy Award for CIO Leadership.  This award will be presented in Washington, DC during NHIT Week (September 16-20).  Stay tuned for more information.

Edited by Gabriel Perna