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This blog post has been prepared in collaboration with Validic. Mr. Schiller is CEO of Validic. Jodi Daniel is a partner in Crowell & Moring’s Health Care Group in Washington, D.C.

Our healthcare system is in the midst of a fundamental shift toward value-based care to drive down costs and improve the quality of care. We won’t be able to achieve that goal without technology that allows providers to collect and use health data and puts patients front and center. Patient access to clinical and claims data is essential. When patients have access to their own information, they can better understand their condition and feel empowered to ask questions and shape their own care plan.

Congress and the federal government are pushing to liberate data from within the healthcare system and to promote patient access to health information. However, it is equally important to focus on the flow of data from the patient back into the healthcare system. The patient – who is gathering data at home, managing her condition, and making day-to-day decisions that impact her health – holds information that is critical to treatment decisions and outcome improvements.
Continue Reading Transforming the Patient-Provider Relationship: A Comprehensive Approach to Patient Access and Patient-Generated Health Data

CMS announced important changes to Medicare reimbursement for remote patient monitoring and telemedicine that can help accelerate adoption and use of these digital health tools. These changes are implemented through two rules released this week that will take effect January 1, 2018. Understanding these rules can help you incorporate these tools into clinical practice and can positively affect the business model for technology developers and innovators.

What are these new rules and do they affect me?

The 2018 Quality Payment Program Final Rule provides policy updates to the Quality Payment Program (QPP), which was established by the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) and will be entering its second year. MACRA offers two “tracks” for eligible clinicians to take as they move toward value-based care:

  • Participation in QPP and its scoring, or
  • Participation in an Advanced Alternative Payment Model (APM).

The majority of Medicare payments are still tied to fee-for-service, but HHS has set a goal of moving to 50 percent of Medicare payments for alternative payment models by 2018. For previous coverage of QPP proposals, visit our summary here.

The 2018 Physician Fee Schedule Final Rule addresses revised payment policies for the Medicare physician fee schedule. Any provisions in the PFS rule typically apply to fee-for-service type providers.
Continue Reading New Reimbursement for Remote Patient Monitoring and Telemedicine