In a single draft coverage memo, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed to eliminate national coverage for artificial hearts and to provide coverage of ventricular assist devices (VADs) coverage for those in need of short-term ventricular support. Coverage of artificial hearts would thus revert to Medicare administrative contractors, while the change in VAD coverage would resolve a long-running dispute between cardiologists and the agency.

The Medical Device Innovation Consortium (MDIC) has worked diligently to stand up the National Evaluation System for health Technologies (NEST) as a functioning program, and the first iteration, known of course as NEST 1.0, is now up and running.

The annual publication of the draft Medicare physician fee schedule (MPFS) is an event, but this year’s draft has drawn substantial criticism from across the board, despite the promise of more coverage of telehealth. The Medical Imaging & Technology Association (MITA) and a coalition of surgeons have blasted the draft as a hazard to patient access to both evaluation and management (E/M) services and surgical procedures, both of which present substantial headwinds for the medical device industry.

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked some innovation in testing, but not all that innovation has made it to market. Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University, said on an Aug. 7 conference call that the U.S. FDA’s “archaic view” of testing is impeding the use of paper strip tests he said would turn the tide in the effort to contain the pandemic.

Real-world evidence (RWE) and clinical trial data might seem to bear little resemblance to each other, but Naomi Aronson, executive director for clinical evaluation at the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, said there are problems common to both. The most significant of these is an absence of validated outcomes measures for many conditions, measures Aronson said are “desperately” needed in order to make an appropriate coverage determination.

The Trump administration has issued an executive order designed to improve access to telehealth for Medicare beneficiaries in rural America, making permanent numerous changes that had been temporarily added for the COVID-19 pandemic. The news arrives as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) posted the draft Medicare physician fee schedule (MPFS) complete with expanded use of telehealth for a number of services.

If there’s a readily visible upside to the COVID-19 pandemic, it may be that telehealth is not only much more accessible, it’s also supremely topical among policymakers. However, privacy concerns are still a significant source of drag in some respects, a consideration that extends to digital medicine as well in the context of contact tracing used to corral the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

After the recent conclusion of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) Scientific Sessions, virtual diabetes management company Onduo LLC held an event with the ADA and diabetes researchers to discuss how technology can help to bridge that gap to empower more diabetes patients.

The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) posted the much-anticipated draft do-over of the mitral valve repair device coverage memo, and in the process renamed the policy the mitral valve transcatheter edge-to-edge repair (TEER) national coverage memo.