Accelerate Digital Health Policy - Interview with Jody Hoffman

In this episode, host John Sharp is joined by Jody Hoffman, Senior Partner at Republic Consulting, LLC and Connected Health Policy Advisor for the Personal Connected Health Alliance. Jody is an expert in health policy and has advised Personal Connected Health Alliance members for a decade through her role in our US Policy Workgroup. Jody addresses many questions about the future of telehealth policy, remote patient monitoring, and other healthcare topics under the new administration.The discussion begins with a consideration of the waivers passed by Congress allowing for expanded telehealth use during the National Health Emergency. These waivers allowed Medicare beneficiaries to access telehealth services in ways that were formerly restricted by CMS rules, as well as allowing hospitals to expand telehealth use with reduced privacy and security requirements. This expansion proved to be a lifeline for many hospitals and healthcare practices early in the pandemic. The question on everyone’s mind is what happens as the COVID emergency winds down? John and Jody explore the future of the telehealth waivers and some of the changes that also enabled remote monitoring for Medicare patients.The discussion moves to broader health IT priorities and some insight into the potential priorities of the incoming administration and new congress. There remains broad agreement that public health infrastructure will take center stage in the coming years and the focus of HIT modernization will begin to shift from EHRs and patient record access to more public health-focused data sharing.Looking towards other regulatory agencies, the conversation ranges from the FDA Digital Health Center of Excellence to other recent rules including interoperability and privacy rules issued by ONC and CMS. John and Jody also take a quick look ahead at a possible introduction of Cures 2.0, an update to the 21st Century Cures Act.