HHS Secretary Pushes for More Transparency in Health Care

HHS Secretary Pushes for More Transparency in Health Care

May 2, 2018 – 10:21 a.m. By Misty Williams, CQ

The Trump administration’s top health official on Wednesday touted new government initiatives to drive the transition of the nation’s health care system toward value and transparency, hinting that more changes are to come.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar emphasized the need for patients to have access to their own health data, arguing that knowing prices and outcomes can allow them to find better, cheaper health care.

One way HHS is working toward that goal is overhauling Medicare’s so-called Blue Button, which allows patients to download their medical histories. A revamped version, Blue Button 2.0, will allow people to share their health data with applications created by private companies, Azar said.

“Patients ought to have access to their data, period, however you want to accomplish it,” he said. “They’ve got to have access to data on price and quality. Knowledge is power.”

Azar spoke Wednesday morning in Washington at the 2018 World Health Care Congress, which brings together health care providers, employers, insurers and government agencies to share best practices and focus on quality improvement and cost effectiveness.

The Blue Button effort is part of the agency’s broad MyHealthEData initiative, launched in conjunction with the White House Office of American Innovation, which is working to put people in charge of their own medical information.

When consumers are empowered, market forces do work, Azar said. He also noted a recent proposal by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to require hospitals to post prices online in an effort to improve transparency for patients. The suggested change is part of a recently released proposed rule seeking a broader overhaul of hospital health IT rules.

CMS also recently released more than 1,000 comments from stakeholders urging the agency to take new actions through the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, Azar said. And CMS recently requested providers' input on surprise billing, director provider contracting within Medicare and other issues, he added.

“It’s been a busy couple of weeks, and every week in the future is going to be quite busy,” he said.

The government also plays a key role in health care innovation as the steward of the world’s largest collection of health care data and the largest funder of biomedical research, Azar said.

CMS will be releasing Medicare Advantage encounter data to researchers for the first time, he noted.

The National Institutes of Health will also begin enrolling people in a $1.5 billion study on Sunday. The goal of the program, called “All of Us,” is to sign up more than 1 million participants who would then undergo a baseline physical and grant the government access to their electronic health records so their health can be tracked over time. NIH also plans to conduct genetic sequencing on their biological samples.

Azar emphasized that officials hope to build trust among populations that historically have been underrepresented in research.

“This will not be just the largest collection of this kind of data in history. It will also be by far the most diverse,” he said. “This kind of data could revolutionize how we treat a range of diseases and conditions.”

New participants will join 25,000 people who have already been part of a year-long early test of the program.