Reps. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Dianna DeGette (D-Colo.) are calling for public input on a potential new bill building on the expansive 21st Century Cures Act, the 2016 law with provisions on interoperability, precision medicine, and other healthcare-related funding.
Before the Thanksgiving holiday, the lawmakers released details on their effort called “Cures 2.0”, aimed at improving patient access to digital health products and new medical therapies. The law would part focus in part on insurance, including speeding coverage of FDA-approved drugs and devices by Medicare, Medicaid, and private payers.
“We believe that digital health technologies hold the promise of modernizing U.S. health care in ways that transform how Americans access medical services,” Upton and Degette said. Among members of Congress and industry stakeholders have expressed skepticism about whether these new efforts will come to fruition. The original 21st Century Cures Act’s passage in the Senate was eased by a boost for National Institutes of Health research and support for the Biden Cancer Initiative. This time around, Senate lawmakers haven’t shown much interest and HHS has yet to implement several digital health provisions of the original 2016 law, including those related to EHR certification and information blocking. (See here and here for more details.)