TGIF

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has had a very busy week:

• Monday, the agency finalized the repeal of the national health plan identifier and other entity designation rule under HIPAA.  The notice explains that 

This final rule eliminates the regulatory requirement for health plans to obtain and use an HPID and eliminates the voluntary acquisition and use of the OEID. The final rule also simplifies the process for deactivating the existing identifiers to minimize operational costs for covered entities. On or after the effective date of this final rule, any active HPID or OEID will be automatically deactivated in the Health Plan and Other Entity Enumeration System (HPOES). If your organization has an HPID or OEID, please take action now to save any necessary information from those records. This rule will become effective 60 days after its publication date.

• Yesterday and today, the agency released final rules for Medicare's calendar year 2020 payment systems for hospital outpatient payment care, physician care, and durable medical equipment / end stage renal disease care.  Healthcare Dive adds that 

[In these rulemakings] President Donald Trump's administration is pushing back a proposal that would have required hospitals to make public the secret rates it negotiates with insurers. 

CMS said it received more than 1,400 comments on revealing rates and will respond to those comments in an upcoming rule. 

The proposal first put forward in July went one step beyond a CMS move from last year, which required hospitals to post the list price, or the initial price before insurance negotiations, online in a machine-readable format. Many criticized the move and said the data was useless for consumers with insurance coverage.

In other news Healthcare Dive

•  offers its take the the HLTH conference;

• informs us that the White House announced the President's plan to nominate Dr. Stephen Hahn  from the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center as Food and Drug Administrator and 

• .eports on favorable third quarter 2019 results from Cigna and Teladoc. 

In other business news, CNBC reports that Google's parent Alphabet acquitted Fitbit today for $2.1 billion in a stock transaction. CNBC expects that the move is aimed at Apple's fitness tracker business. 

Finally, Cleveland Clinic projects the top 10 medical innovations for 2020. For example

Therapy for Peanut Allergies  --It’s a terrifying reality for 2.5 percent of parents – the possibility that at any moment, their child might be unable to breathe due to an allergic reaction. Though emergency epinephrine has reduced the severity and risk of accidental exposure, these innovations are not enough to quell the ever-present anxiety. But development of a new oral immunotherapy medication to gradually build tolerance to peanut exposure holds the opportunity to lend protection against attack.

Bravo for the innovators.