Maverick's Update

For the fifth time, UConn won the college men’s basketball championship, reminding everyone once again that Connecticut exists — and it is large enough to have universities. This week, we are reading about a bigger state’s universities, because they published some important research about health data. We were surprised to see how this particular health data research relates to the new Barbie movie coming out this summer. We explain this connection below in the One Thoughtful Paragraph.

News that would be better if we had read it in Barbie’s Dream House:

• The U.S. National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, is getting serious about collecting data about Alzheimer’s. It announced plans to fund a six-year, $300M project to create an Alzheimer’s research database, focused on collecting and analyzing real-world data (i.e., patient-generated data collected in the home, mobile devices and wearables) to better understand the disease.
• Just ahead of an anticipated new rule from the DEA about which drugs doctors can prescribe during telehealth visits, the HHS Office of National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) published a blog explaining that some electronic health record systems aren’t equipped to check other states’ data to see if a patient has a controlled substance prescription history there. ONC is working on guidance to encourage this interstate data sharing — which could be an effective tool for monitoring drug diversion and misuse —because it is not uncommon for patients to cross state lines to receive care.
• CMS rolled out its annual Medicare Advantage rule this week, and somewhere in the 700+ pages the agency clarified how health plans can keep their prior authorization decisions about medical necessity in line with Traditional Medicare’s coverage decisions. CMS declined to implement some recommendations to make prior authorization criteria publicly available, or standardize the timeline, format and content of prior authorization decisions, saying that the anticipated electronic prior authorization rule was expected to address these things.

One Thoughtful Paragraph