For Immediate Release:
Contact: Kelly Broadway, 202-808-8853
kbroadway@health-innovation.org
118th Congress has the Opportunity to Improve Healthcare for all Americans
Washington, D.C. – The Health Innovation Alliance (HIA) today shared its priorities for improving healthcare access and delivery with the 118th Congress.
“If the past three years have taught us anything, it is that our healthcare system can function drastically better through the use of technology, and we must do everything we can to keep pushing that forward. The 118th Congress should demand better care by encouraging interoperability, privacy, virtual care, and more seamless health transactions for providers and patients,” said Brett Meeks, Vice President of HIA.
In a letter sent to lawmakers, HIA outlines six priority areas of focus:
Public health
Privacy
Interoperability
Digital health
Electronic prior authorization
Fraud detection and prevention
The need for improving the public health system topped HIA’s list of concerns. HIA continued its call for oversight of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to ensure that it is not wasting money on duplicative work or creating burdensome reporting requirements for state and local public health organizations. HIA believes the CDC’s focus should be on ensuring a smooth flow of public health data between the agency, providers, front-line health workers, and public health entities.
Privacy reform and interoperability also dominated HIA’s priorities. HIA announced its ongoing support for the Health Data Use and Privacy Commission Act, a bill that HIA believes is vital to addressing the gap between HIPAA and the use of health data by third-party applications or other technologies. The Commission would provide Congress with recommendations on modernizing the use of health data and privacy laws and would work to ensure patient privacy and trust while balancing the need for doctors to have information to provide care.
To help providers access this patient information, HIA highlighted solutions from its Interoperability Report. The report identified six key areas that would improve interoperability and use of healthcare data, including integrating automated public health reporting tools into existing systems, allowing patients to share their health information with medical researchers, and promoting accessible repositories of clinical trials to promote medical research.
HIA also called on lawmakers to permanently extend telehealth flexibilities, including patients using their Health Savings Accounts to pay for telehealth services without first meeting their deductible, allowing telehealth services covered under Medicare to remain reimbursable, and treating telehealth and remote care services as an excepted benefit under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA).
HIA urged Congress to pass legislation to standardize electronic prior authorization for prescriptions and services to ensure patients have access to both the medications and care they need. HIA believes that improving this process will benefit everyone involved.
HIA acknowledged that incorporating more technology into healthcare increases opportunities for fraud. To counter it, HIA called on Congress to modernize and incorporate innovative technologies, like artificial intelligence, to ensure fraud detection and prevention at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
“Technology can and should be used to help lower healthcare costs, improve care, and better patient safety. HIA looks forward to working with the new Congress to implement common-sense policies to improve healthcare with technology and data,” said Meeks.
To read HIA’s letter to Congress, click here.