Health Law Advisor

On July 1, 2024 the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (“CMMI”) will be inaugurating a new value-based payment model designed specifically to address the devastating impacts that a diagnosis of dementia^[1] or Alzheimer’s Disease[2] can have on a patient, their family, friends, and other caregivers who make up the patient’s circle of support. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”) designed the Guiding an Improved Dementia Experience (“GUIDE”) model (the “Model”) for health care providers enrolled in Medicare Part B and that treat ...

Introduction

Following the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade, the federal government, pursuant to President Biden’s Executive Order (the EO) took several steps to protect reproductive health privacy, some of which we previously discussed here. Specifically, the EO called for agencies to protect “women’s fundamental right to make reproductive health decisions.” Shortly following issuance of the EO, the Biden Administration created its HHS Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force, requiring all relevant federal agencies to draft measurable actions that they could undertake “to protect and bolster access to sexual and reproductive health care.”  

On December 1, 2022, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published a bulletin warning that commonly used website technologies, including cookies, pixels, and session replay, may result in the impermissible disclosure of Protected Health Information (“PHI”) to third parties in violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (“HIPAA”). The bulletin advises that “[r]egulated entities are not permitted to use tracking technologies in a manner that would result in impermissible disclosures of Protected Health Information (“PHI”) to tracking technology vendors or any other violations of the HIPAA Rules.” The bulletin is issued amidst a wider national and international privacy landscape that is increasingly focused on regulating the collection and use of personal information through web-based technologies and software that may not be readily apparent to the user.

In this episode of the Diagnosing Health Care Podcast:  In the past decade, certified electronic health records (EHRs) have been instrumental in transforming medical records from paper to digital formats.

What obstacles are currently preventing providers from sharing patient data with each other or patients from sharing health information from their personal devices with their providers? In this episode of our special series on interoperability, hear from Tomaž Gornik, founder and CEO of Better.

Only a few days remain before the enforcement delay that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) exercised due to COVID-19 will end and the agency will require certain payors to publish a Patient Access application programming interface (“API”) and a Provider Directory API under the requirements of the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule. Starting on July 1, 2021, all health plans that offer Medicare Advantage, Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and most Qualified Health Plans offered through the Federally-facilitated ...

The roll out of the Office of the National Coordinator’s (ONC) 21^st Century Cures Act Interoperability and Information Blocking Rules is reminiscent of the way HIPAA has rolled out over the course of the past 25 years. As of May 1, 2021, Actors have been required to comply with the Information Blocking rules. However, it will take some time before all Actors know who they are and for complaints of Information Blocking to be determined to be actual instances of Information Blocking, by which time the penalties that have not yet been finalized may also need to be adjusted.

While ONC defined ...

As employers continue their efforts to safely bring employees back to the workplace, many have moved beyond initial pre-entry wellness checks or questionnaires and are considering technology solutions that monitor social distancing and conduct contact tracing in real-time. Along with introducing these enhanced capabilities, the question of the privacy and security of employee personally identifiable information (“PII”) and protected health information (“PHI”) continues to loom.

In order to isolate and contain the spread of COVID-19, one critical component of an ...