Maverick's Update

Decoration Day is the original name of Memorial Day. The name reflects the act of decorating the graves of civil war soldiers with spring flowers. It wasn’t until 1971 that the last Monday in May became a federal holiday to recognize all fallen war heroes. As we plan to take a day to celebrate those that sacrificed everything for us, we are spending a few minutes to remember the strength and courage of rock and roll icon Tina Turner. While blasting Proud Mary, we noticed this lyric: “we never ever do nothing nice, easy.” That’s so true when it comes to health information policymaking, which we explain in the One Thoughtful Paragraph.

The big wheels keep on turning in health information policy news:

• The FTC proposed amendments to the Health Breach Notification Rule, including clarifying the rule’s applicability to health apps and other direct-to-consumer health technologies. In fact, the FTC recently accused the fertility app known as “Premom” of violating the Health Breach Notification Rule for disclosing sensitive health data to two China-based firms and Google without informing its users.
• Many health systems pledged to use Epic’s software to share health information through the federal government’s TEFCA framework. Find the list of organizations here.
• CMS released a proposed rule to require pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) to disclose the prices they negotiate for prescription drugs in the Medicaid program. Medicaid managed care plans’ contracts with state Medicaid programs will have to reflect “transparent reporting of drug payment information” if the rule is implemented.

One Thoughtful Paragraph