Policy letter to Diane DeGette and Fred Upton on Recommendations for Cures 2.0

UCSF’s Center for Digital Health Innovation focuses on three specific recommendations for Cures 2.0 in the areas of shared care planning, digital health interoperability, and patient access to their health data collected by mobile health apps and devices. To complement the Cures Act’s provision on patients’ access to their health data, Cures 2.0 should add a complementary vision for shared care planning that includes patients, clinical settings, and non-clinical settings and caregivers. Secondly, the Cures Act defined and established interoperability as a national imperative. We recommend that Cures 2.0 integrate a comprehensive interoperability measurement framework from ONC and NQF in order to measure and evaluate where interoperability does and does not exist. Lastly, today’s digital health ecosystem collects significant amounts of health data in patients’ third-party mobile health apps. Cures 2.0 should extend patients’ right of access to include health information collected by the mobile health apps and devices that patients (and providers and plans) increasingly use these days to monitor, diagnose, and treat.