Federal Telemedicine News

AFCEA’s Bethesda Chapter has just announced exciting speakers for their annual “Health IT Summit: Collaborating for a Resilient Health IT Ecosystem” to be held at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel and Conference Center on Tuesday & Wednesday January 17-18, 2023.

The Summit will be filled with keynote addresses, panelists specializing in Health IT initiatives, plus breakout sessions exploring telehealth, veteran care, cybersecurity, data science, emerging technology, and much more from a number of Federal agencies.

Today, technology provides an environment for collaboration among key players in the healthcare system, including government, private sector partners, and academia. So don’t miss out on the ample networking opportunities available at the Health IT Summit 2023.

The Speakers taking part in the two day Summit, will be top leaders from HHS, NIH, CMS, and many more from other agencies and other sources will be announced soon. Top agency officials will provide news and information on topics such as Federal telehealth, cybersecurity, emerging technologies, health equity, and strengthening cross-agency and industry collaborations.

A sampling of some of the stimulating speakers scheduled includes the CXO Panel Discussion with Rajiv Uppal, CIO at CMS (pending approval), to discuss his thoughts and ideas. In addition, a panel discussion on Acquisitions will be held with Ricky Clark, Deputy Director at NITAAC.

CMS Breakout Session will include a panel of CMS leaders who will share how innovative technology implementations can save the agency money, reduce burden, and improve the user experience. Learn how technology innovations are integrated into everything they do at CMS, from modernizing the claims payment process, to including health equity in all CMS initiatives.

Day 1 Breakout Session will include top officials from CMS such as:

• Arrah Tabe-Bedward, Deputy Director CMMI
• Lee Ann Crochunis, OIT Director, Applications Management Group
• Chandra Dyamangoudar, Group Director, CCSQ’s Information systems Group
• Marc Richardson, Senior IT Executive CMS

Andrea Fletcher, Director of Digital Services at CMS, will moderate the Session

Capt. Heather Demeris, the Director, for the Office for the Advancement of Telehealth at HRSA within HHS will also provide her thoughts and ideas on Day 1.

On Day 2, A Breakout Session will concentrate on Cybersecurity and ways to collaborate to meet new federal cybersecurity requirements.

Day 2 Breakout Session will have Gerald J. Caron III, Chief Information Officer (CIO, Assistant Inspector General for Information Technology, Office of the Inspector Genera, at HHS, will lead the discussion on cybersecurity. Jill Aitoro, SVP, Content Strategy CyberRisk Alliance will Moderate the session.  

Another breakout session will discuss “Enabling Cross Cutting Health Equity Programs with Technology’ by Tom Harrel, IT Specialist/Sr. IT Policy Analyst from NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, leading the discussion.

Register today to reserve your seat! More speakers with vital ideas are being added daily to the list of speakers. Be sure to go to https://bethesda.afceachapters.org for more information. To find out more about sponsorship opportunities, go to registrar@afceabethesda.org.

The Rockefeller Foundation https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org is providing $3 million in funding for Global.health, an open source data science platform to strengthen pathogen surveillance and response.

The new funding will support data integration between Global.health, and others to analyze genomic, climate, wastewater, mobility epidemiological and clinical data. The goal is to be able to better predict emerging threats of infectious disease and to coordinate the global response by:

• Evaluating the impact of different data sources to define which data points are the most useful during the first 100 days of an infectious disease outbreak
• Developing scalable and robust open source algorithms and data pipelines to detect and predict the emergence and geographic spread of new COVID-19 Variants of Concern globally
• Combining human mobility data with network science algorithms to optimally configure and distribute public health interventions during emerging epidemics beyond the constraints of country or state borders
• Creating open source methods and frameworks for pandemic response analyses so outputs can be directly usable by groups engaged in pandemic preparedness and improve the translation of science into practical applications that can work with real world outbreak response
• Cultivating working groups with international teams of scientists while prioritizing lower and middle income countries to co-develop applications and translate them into real world impact as they are being generated

Dr. Moritz Kraemer Associate Professor, University of Oxford, and John Brownstein, Professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and Co-Founders of Global.health, commented, “The new funding from the Rockefeller Foundation will allow us to dive deeper into which data and interventions have the most impact for controlling disease outbreaks at different stages of a pandemic.” 

The $3 million in funding for Global.health was made by RF Catalytic Capital, Inc., the foundation’s public charity launched in 2020 as a new innovative tool for foundations, impact investors, businesses, and governments. The goal is to combine their resource to scale funding solutions to bring about transformational change during the COVID-19 response and recovery.  

More than 37 million in the U.S have diabetes but many don’t receive timely care which can lead to costly, even deadly complications. While effective treatments are available in primary care settings, clinicians lack the tools necessary to identify those patients at the highest risk.

To prevent poor health outcomes, researchers at the University of Houston https://www.uh.edu are developing Primary Care Forecast, a clinical decision support system that uses deep learning to predict which patients are more likely to experience complications.

The first tool to be developed within the AI system is the Diabetes Complication Severity Index (DCSI) Progression Tool, which in addition to a patient’s health history, considers how their social and environment circumstances, employment status, living arrangement, education level, and food security could increase their risk for complications,-

Funded by the American Board of Family Medicine https://www.theabfm.org, the DCSI Progression tool will provide clinicians with timely, actionable insights so they can intervene early, reduce the percentage of individuals with diabetes who have complications, and lower the number of complications affecting each patient.

“Our long time goal is to help clinicians become more proactive and less reactive when treating diabetes. By leveraging the capabilities of AI and ML, we can more effectively connect at risk individuals with interventions before they become sicker,” said Dr. Winston Liaw, PI of the Project, and Chair, Department of Health Systems and Population Health Sciences at the Tilman J. Fertitta Family College of Medicine.

The DCSI Progression Tool will be developed in collaboration with the Humana Integrated Health System Sciences Institute at the University of Houston and leverage unique data sets from Humana Inc. to include claims, health records, along with individual and community social risk factors. The tool will be tested within the PRIME Registry, a national platform that includes millions of primary care patients nationwide.

Today, there are over 400,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests a year in the U.S with a survival rate of less than 10%, making cardiac arrest a highly challenging public health problem.

Dealing with this public health issue is further complicated by care fragmentation, regional variation in resources, and care gaps that can impact rural settings and racial and ethnic minorities.

Cardiac arrest is further fragmented largely due to the lack of integration and coordination among 15,000 locally administered dispatch centers and emergency medical services agencies and over 5,200 acute care hospitals involved in treating victims of cardiac arrents.

Duke University cardiology researchers are teaming up with North Carolina Emergency Care Personnel such as EMS, fire, police, 911 dispatch and community members to conduct a randomized trial to test interventions to improve survival for out of hospital cardiac arrest.

The Randomized Cluster Evaluation of Cardiac Arrest Systems referred to as (RACE-CARS), covers a geographic area of 62 counties involving eight million residents and expects to enroll 20,000 cardiac arrest patients over a four year period.

It is one of the first U.S registry trials where all eligible patients are included and data is efficiently collected in routine care. The trial is being conducted by the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) https://dcri.org with a $15 million grant from NIH https://www.nih.gov .  

To do the trial, 62 counties were randomly assigned to intervention or control groups. Intervention counties are focused on community CPR and AED treatment, 911 dispatch performance, and first responder treatment for out of hospital cardiac arrest..

The goal is to have more patients with cardiac arrest treated with bystander CPR and early defibrillation. Intervention counties are working closely with the trial team to carry out and evaluate trial interventions while the control groups will continue to provide their usual care.

The data collection phase began in July 2020 and runs through June 30, 2027. The collection phase uses the pre-exiting Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival (ARES) for patient enrollment, a platform previously implemented in North Carolina by the RACE CARS team. CARES collects data from 911 dispatch centers, EMS agencies, hospitals, and then links that information in a single record.

Before approving a new medical device, regulators evaluate its safety and effectiveness. This includes considering the successful achievement of predetermined clinical trial results. To date, patients have had limited input on how clinical trial success is defined.

The Medical Device Innovation Consortium (MDIC) https://mdic.org program has released a new framework in order to provide U.S. medical device companies a systematic approach for patient focused clinical trial design to better meet patient needs and priorities.

The Science of Patient Input (SPI) with representatives from FDA, patient advocacy groups, and the medical device industry have developed the approach so that the studies used to evaluate medical devices can better align with patients’ interests.

Potential Benefits for Incorporating SPI into Clinical Trial Design are to:

• Provide Clinical Trial outcome data that matters to patients
• Increase the development of devices that patients find useful
• Develop increased patient trust in medical devices
• Determine clear patient preferences regarding risk/benefit of medical devices
• Provide for faster study/research participant recruitment, enrollment, and study completion
• Obtain greater study/research participation resulting in decreased loss to follow-up
• Streamline data collection which results in better quality data
• Need fewer protocol revisions.

The approach is detailed in the new SPI framework “Using Patient Preference Information in the Design of Clinical Trials. According to MDIC, SPI Program Director Kert Gunasekaran, “Our SPI program embraces the opportunity for industry to incorporate patient input more systematically into the process of developing products, enhances our pathways to deliver unmet needs for patients, and ultimately speeds access to new therapies.

CDC Seeks Tool for Mental Health

CDC https://www.cdc.gov has issued the grant notice “Research Grants to Develop and Validate a Prognostic Tool of Mental Health Sequelae after TBI for Adolescent Patients” (RFA-CE-23-008) https://cdc.gov/injury/index.html with estimated funding for $5,500,000. The grant notice posted November 16, 2022 has January 24, 2023 as the closing date for applications.

CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) is soliciting investigator-initiated research proposals to conduct a well-designed, longitudinal study with a large pediatric healthcare systems service to help a diverse patient population.

The goal is to derive and validate a new prognostic tool that identifies adolescents (ages 11-17) at increased risk for mental health sequelae or a worsening of an existing mental health condition.

Of particular interest is research that focuses on the adolescent populations shown to have higher rates of TBI incidence or greater risk of negative post TBI outcomes such as with Black and Hispanic youth, youth living in rural areas, and those without insurance.

The primary objectives are to:

• Identify at risk/protective factors in the acute care setting that can predict new or worsening mental health within the three months following a TBI among adolescents (ages 11-17)
• Develop a new prognostic tool based on empirically derived risk/protective factors, that can aid in predicting which adolescents in a clinical setting are more likely to experience a worsening of an existing mental health condition

Eligible applicants can include public and state controlled institutions of higher education, state governments, Native American tribal governments, nonprofits, small businesses, for profit organizations, city or township governments, county governments, and private institutions of higher education.

Go to https://www.grants.gov/web/grants/search-grants.html for more information.

CDC https://www.cdc.gov has issued the grant notice “Research Grants to Develop and Validate a Prognostic Tool of Mental Health Sequelae after TBI for Adolescent Patients” (RFA-CE-23-008) https://cdc.gov/injury/index.html with estimated funding for $5,500,000. The grant notice posted November 16, 2022 has January 24, 2023 as the closing date for applications.

CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) is soliciting investigator-initiated research proposals to conduct a well-designed, longitudinal study with a large pediatric healthcare systems service to help a diverse patient population.

The goal is to derive and validate a new prognostic tool that identifies adolescents (ages 11-17) at increased risk for mental health sequelae or a worsening of an existing mental health condition.

Of particular interest is research that focuses on the adolescent populations shown to have higher rates of TBI incidence or greater risk of negative post TBI outcomes such as with Black and Hispanic youth, youth living in rural areas, and those without insurance.

The primary objectives are to:

• Identify at risk/protective factors in the acute care setting that can predict new or worsening mental health within the three months following a TBI among adolescents (ages 11-17)
• Develop a new prognostic tool based on empirically derived risk/protective factors, that can aid in predicting which adolescents in a clinical setting are more likely to experience a worsening of an existing mental health condition

Eligible applicants can include public and state controlled institutions of higher education, state governments, Native American tribal governments, nonprofits, small businesses, for profit organizations, city or township governments, county governments, and private institutions of higher education.

Go to https://www.grants.gov/web/grants/search-grants.html for more information.