Premier Urges Policy Action to Advance Digital Health

Premier submitted a statement to the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health in connection with its hearing, Health at Your Fingertips: Harnessing the Power of Digital Health Data, offering policy recommendations to support innovative, high-quality care.

In its statement, Premier identified three core pillars as essential to building a modern and effective healthcare technology ecosystem: patient-centered records, advanced digital health tools, and a strong privacy and cybersecurity framework. To strengthen and modernize the nation's digital health infrastructure, Premier urged the subcommittee to consider the following targeted policy solutions that will accelerate innovation, enhance data accessibility, and ensure the security of sensitive health information:

• Support policies and incentives to improve patient access to digital health by:
  • Examining ways to provide a path to payment, incentivizing providers to leverage digital health; and
  • Striving to increase adoption of digital health technology across the range of patient care settings
• Develop a future healthcare workforce that can fully utilize digital health technologies by:
  • Encouraging medical schools and accreditation programs to develop curricula for the healthcare workforce that incorporates digital health technologies; and
  • Encouraging the development of evidence-backed models to evaluate the success of virtual care and virtual nursing programs.
• Ensuring competition and innovation by:
  • Supporting standardizing healthcare data sharing across elements, technologies, and sources;
  • Fostering innovation and competition in the digital health market by encouraging competition with EHR platform default products; and
  • Encouraging CMS to strengthen and enforce information blocking penalties on all health data ecosystem participants.
• Secure patient care by:
  • Pursuing policies that move the US closer to portable, patient-centered longitudinal health records;
  • Acknowledging the importance of a federal privacy standard that protects patient health information outside of HIPAA; and
  • Considering requiring cybersecurity transparency and reporting for digital health vendors.