WEDI Makes Recommendations to HHS on Key No Surprises Act Issue. WEDI sent a letter to Xavier Becerra, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), on the issue of including diagnosis codes on Good Faith Estimations (GFEs) for insured individuals. GFEs are required under the No Surprises Act. WEDI’s recommendations included urging HHS to strongly encourage but not require providers to include diagnosis codes on GFEs in “shopping” situations where the provider may not have a clinical encounter with the patient. In situations where the GFE is for scheduled services (likely following a direct encounter with the provider), WEDI recommended that diagnosis codes be required on the GFE to permit health plans to issue a more accurate Advanced Explanation of Benefits. Special thanks to the WEDI No Surprises Act Task Group co-chairs Terry Cunningham (AHA), Beth Davis (Veradigm), Stanley Nachimson (Nachimson Advisors), and Tom Wilder (UHC), for leading the Task Group discussions and developing the recommendations.   

ASTP ONC Details Cancer Patient Use of Electronic Information. In a data brief, the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy (ASTP), Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), discusses pooling data from two years of the National Cancer Institute’s nationally representative Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) to examine the access and use of electronic health information by individuals with cancer in 2020-2022.  

Highlights from the data brief include: (i) More than 6 in 10 individuals with a recent cancer diagnosis were offered and accessed their online medical records in 2020-2022, a significant increase from 2017-2018; (ii) Individuals with a recent cancer diagnosis frequently accessed their online medical records: 40% accessed their records 6 or more times in the past year – nearly twice the rate of those who have never had cancer (23%); (iii) Frequent users and individuals with a recent cancer diagnosis had higher rates of using multiple methods (both an app and website) to access their online medical records; (iv) Nearly all users with a recent cancer diagnosis used their online medical records or patient portal to view test results; and (v) More than half of individuals with a recent cancer diagnosis reported having multiple patient portals or online medical records. 

OCR Decides to Drop Appeal of Website Tracking Decision. OCR initially filed an appeal in American Hospital Association v. Becerra, a lawsuit that sought to bar enforcement of an OCR rule governing use of online tracking tools, and then filed a motion to withdraw it. The OCR regulation, "Use of Online Tracking Technologies by HIPAA Covered Entities and Business Associates," was designed to protect patient privacy by limiting the scope of tracking pixel use. A Texas court blocked the agency's ability to prohibit hospital websites from using consumer-tracking technology under HIPAA. 

Senator Introduces Five Bills Focused on AI. U.S. Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD) announced the introduction of a package of five artificial intelligence (AI) bills. The package seeks to increase AI literacy, enable the use of AI to enhance the efficiency of U.S. Shipyards, spur innovation in financial services and improve healthcare outcomes. The package of AI Bills include: 

• The GUIDE AI Act: Establishes a centralized data exchange center for biomedical data through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR).  

• The Unleashing AI Innovation in Financial Services Act: Establishes regulatory sandboxes at financial regulatory agencies for regulated entities to test AI projects, allowing them to responsibly experiment with cutting-edge technologies in the financial services space.   

• The Consumers LEARN AI Act: Develops a national literacy strategy, providing specific AI use case guidance and conducting a national media campaign to help consumers make informed decisions about how they use and interact with AI.  

• The Increasing AI Transparency in Financial Services Act: Requires reports on AI regulation in the financial services industry.  

• Legislation to require the Secretary of Defense to carry out a pilot program on using AI-enabled software to optimize operations of depots, shipyards and other manufacturing facilities run by the Department of Defense. This bill has been included in the base text of the Senate Fiscal Year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act 

Rounds serves as one of four members of the Senate’s bipartisan AI working group, along with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Senators Todd Young (R-Ind.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.).  

NIST to Hold Workshop on Technical Language Processing. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in partnership with the Technical Language Processing Community of Interest (TLP COI), will host the virtual 2024 TLP COI Meeting and Workshop on September 24-25. The program seeks to connect and share insights among TLP researchers, developers, practitioners, and consumers. Attendees will explore emerging tools and technologies, with expert speakers and panelists discussing current tools, best practices, and real-world TLP applications in industry, government, and academia. Go here to learn more and register.  

FTC Recommends Steps to Avoid Widespread Systems Failures. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) addresses how widespread software outages can be averted in a recent blog. They highlight the importance of resilience as crucial for maintaining software functionality despite bugs or unexpected conditions. This blog comes on the heels of several widespread system outages impacting multiple sectors. Many software flaws, they note, can be preemptively addressed through systematic processes like rigorous testing, incremental rollouts, and resilient application programming interfaces (APIs). Resilience can be threatened by a lack of competition in critical inputs and improper handling of code, configuration, and data changes. 

HC3 Issues Alert on Grant Donation Email Scams. The Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center (HC3) issued a new Sector Alert highlighting the rise of grant donation email scams targeting individuals and businesses facing economic challenges, including those in the health care sector. According to HC3, these actors falsely claim that recipients have won significant amounts of money, which then can lead to potential losses of protected health information and include identity theft.  

New Report Outlines Telehealth Usage. An article published in Health Affairs entitled “Telehealth Delivery Differs Significantly By Physician And Practice Characteristics,” researchers examined telehealth usage. The study used 2022 Medicare fee-for-service claims and found that female physicians, primary care physicians, psychiatrists, and physicians in nonrural practices delivered relatively higher proportions of visits via telehealth. Other findings included: Some major findings of the report: (i) Female physicians were still "significantly more likely" to deliver telehealth visits once adjustments were made for specialty and practice characteristics; (ii) Telehealth provision differed widely by the services offered. Psychiatrists were the leading specialty in terms of such provision with 23% of such physicians offering all or most of their services via telehealth. Neurologists and infectious disease providers were next highest on the list. Dermatologists and ophthalmologists were among the lowest users of telehealth services. Rural areas offered less telehealth provision; (iii) While physicians in metropolitan areas offered 8.3% of their overall services via telehealth, their rural counterparts offered only 5.3%; and (iv) Primary care physicians with greater use of telehealth tended to see "more medically and social complex patients"; psychiatrists using more telehealth tended to see fewer such patients. Overall, 77.9% of primary care physicians provided less than 10% of their services via telehealth.