From Washington, DC —

• The Department of Labor announced
  • “The Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and the Treasury today announced an important step in addressing the nation’s mental health crisis by proposing rules to better ensure that people seeking coverage for mental health and substance use disorder care can access treatment as easily as people seeking coverage for medical treatments. * * *
  • “The Department of Labor, in consultation with the Departments of Health and Human Services and the Treasury, also issued a technical release today that requests public feedback on proposed new data requirements for limitations related to the composition of a health plan’s or issuer’s network. 
  • “The technical release seeks public comment to inform guidance for proposed data collection and evaluation requirements for nonquantitative treatment limitations related to network composition and requests input on the development of an enforcement safe harbor for plans and issuers that submit data indicating that their networks of mental health and substance use disorder providers are comparable to networks for medical/surgical providers. 
  • “The departments also released the second Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act’s Comparative Analysis Report to Congress, as required by federal law. At the same time, the Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration and Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued a joint fact sheet on the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act enforcement results for cases closed in fiscal year 2022.
  • “With the proposed rules and technical release, the departments aim to promote changes in network composition and plans’ and issuers’ medical management techniques to make mental health and substance use disorder provider networks more accessible and create parity in treatment limitations, such as network composition standards and prior authorizations, for people seeking mental health and substance use disorder treatment.”
• STAT News adds,
  • “The new rule would force insurers to evaluate their own networks to measure not just whether they’re offering adequate mental health and addiction coverage but also whether patients are truly accessing it.
  • “This rule will ensure that we have true parity,” Neera Tanden, President Biden’s domestic policy advisor, said during a press call. “It will help ensure we finally fulfill the promise of mental health parity required under the law, to ensure that mental health is covered just like physical health.”
• The public comment deadline will occur in late September.
• The FEHBlog notes that health plans cannot coerce providers into their networks. The FEHBlog thought that hub and spoke tele-mental health networks would fill the gap, but that apparently hasn’t happened.

• AHIP announced
  • “AHIP, the American Medical Association (AMA), and the National Association of ACOs (NAACOS) today announced the release of data-sharing best practices that organizations may voluntarily adopt to support a sustainable future for value-based care. The playbook, The Future of Sustainable Value-Based Care and Payment: Voluntary Best Practices to Advance Data Sharing, is intended to advance the adoption of value-based care arrangements in the private sector that could have a greater impact on the quality and equity of care and ease participation by fostering voluntary alignment of data sharing practices.”
  • Check it out.

• The National Coordinator for Health Information Technology released on July 20, 2023,
  • “ONC Standards Bulletin 2023-2 (SB23-2) [which] describes the background of United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) and the development of the USCDI Version 4 (USCDI v4) * * *. USCDI is a standard developed and adopted by ONC on behalf of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that sets the technical and policy foundation for the access, exchange, and use of electronic health information to support nationwide, interoperable health information exchange. USCDI benefits a wide range of entities, individuals, and other interested parties, including federal agencies supporting health and healthcare, hospitals, research organizations, clinicians, and health IT developers. ONC publishes new versions of USCDI annually, with a draft version in January and a final version in July. This publishing cadence keeps pace with medical, technological, and policy changes. USCDI v4 includes new data elements that advance the Biden-Harris Administration’s priorities of advancing equity, diversity, and access across all healthcare settings.
  • “SB23-2 describes the ONC approach for the continued expansion of USCDI, as well as the specific priorities for adding new data elements to USCDI v4. This bulletin also includes discussion of the feedback received on the Draft USCDI v4, including recommendations received from the ONC Health IT Advisory Committee (HITAC).”

• The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force gave a draft inconclusive grade for “screening for speech and language delay and disorders in children age 5 years or younger.” The USPSTF previously gave the same grade to the screening service in 2015. The public comment deadline is August 21, 2023.

• FedSmith notes that the OPM final rule expanding FEDVIP eligibility will add “over 70,000 federal employees and 118,000 Postal employees” to the pool of employees eligible for FEDVIP.

From the public health front —

• U.S. News reports
  • “Both coronavirus emergency department visits and test positivity increased, according to CDC data. The agency no longer tracks COVID-19 cases. Instead, it focuses on hospitalizations and deaths, which don’t yet show an increase.
  • “The CDC reported last week that it was the first time since January that COVID-19 metrics showed an increase. The uptick is small, but it’s a notable reversal after months of declining coronavirus numbers.
  • “Certain COVID-19 indicators continued their recent rise last week, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

• HHS’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality issued a roundtable report about “Optimizing Health and Function as We Age.”

• Yahoo News tells us,
  • “Drugmaker Pfizer Inc said over 30 drugs, including injections of painkiller fentanyl and anesthetic lidocaine, may see supply disruption after a tornado destroyed a warehouse at its Rocky Mount, North Carolina, plant last week.
  • “The company sent a letter late last week to its hospital customers saying it had identified around 64 different formulations or dosages of those more than 30 drugs produced at the plant that may experience continued or new supply disruptions.
  • “The company has placed limits on how much supply of those drugs its customers can buy.”

• Medscape shares CDC guidance about the two new RSV vaccines for adult that the FDA and CDC recently approved.
  • “Older adults deciding whether to get the vaccines should weigh risks and their own preferences and make the decision in consultation with their clinician, say authors of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report published Friday.
  • “Michael Melgar, MD, with the Coronavirus and Other Respiratory Viruses Division at the CDC, was lead author on the report, published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.“

From the U.S. healthcare business front,

• BioPharma Dive informs us,
  • “Biogen on Tuesday said it will eliminate 1,000 jobs as part of a cost-cutting drive that it expects will save $1 billion in annual operating expenses by 2025.
  • “The company plans to invest $300 million of those savings into product launches as well as research and development, which it has spent the first half of this year reorganizing under new CEO Chris Viehbacher.
  • “There’s been a complete redesign of Biogen,” Viehbacher said on a conference call with analysts. “This is an opportunity to make sure that in this year, before we get into [new] product launches, that we are truly fit for growth.”

• STAT News lets us know that “As Alzheimer’s drugs hit the market, the race for early detection blood tests heats up” and offers an interview with the American Medical Association’s new president Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld.

• Fierce Health relates,
  • “Teladoc’s second-quarter revenue jumped 10% to $652 million, boosted by strong growth in its BetterHelp direct-to-consumer mental health segment.
  • “The telehealth giant also narrowed its losses this past quarter to a net loss of $65 million, or a loss of 40 cents per share, compared to a loss of $3 billion for the second quarter of 2022. Both results beat Wall Street estimates.
  • “The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Teladoc’s second-quarter earnings per share was pegged at a loss of 44 cents and revenue of $649 million.”

In low-value care news, the National Institutes of Health tells us, “A device known as a pessary, thought promising for reducing preterm birth risk due to a short cervix, appears no more effective than usual medical care, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. A pessary is a rounded silicone device that fits around a cervix that has shortened, to keep it from opening and leading to miscarriage or preterm birth. The device is typically removed before the 37^th week of pregnancy.”