AcademyHealth Submits Comments on CMS's Part D Data Access Rule

On October 18, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) posted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in the Federal Register that would allow the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and CMS to use Part D data to evaluate Medicare's prescription drug program. Under the proposed rule, other federal agencies and external researchers would be able to use the prescription drug data under the same safeguards that exist for Medicare's other data. The original Part D regulations cite a statutory section in the Medicare Modernization Act that states these data cannot be used for research-even though under other sections of the statute, these data can be used for research and other purposes. CMS must follow the rulemaking process to resolve this statutory ambiguity.

Given the implications of this rule on our mission, our members, and the research community, AcademyHealth's Board of Directors agreed to submit official comments on the proposed rule. In the comments submitted December 18, AcademyHealth emphasized that these and other regulations promoting the use of data for health services research are essential to the public good. We commended CMS for proposing a rule that balances transparency and the use of analysis to support important public policy goals with the need to protect personal health information privacy as well as the proprietary concerns of private entities. At the same time, we used the comments as an opportunity to express our concerns about the overall process for securing and using data in Medicare-related health services research. 

For more information, please contact Emily Holubowich, Director of Government Relations, at emily.Holubowich@academyhealth.org.