NIH, CMS Partner to Advance Understanding of Autism Through Secure Access to Select Medicare and Medicaid Data

Excerpt:  “The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) today announced a landmark partnership to enable NIH to build a real-world data platform enabling advanced research across claims data, electronic medical records, and consumer wearables. This partnership will focus first on enabling research around the root causes of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In the long term, the partnership will link real-world data, in a manner consistent with applicable privacy laws to protect Americans’ sensitive health information, for research on chronic conditions—a core priority of President Trump and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. … CMS and NIH will start this partnership by establishing a data use agreement under CMS’ Research Data Disclosure Program focused on Medicare and Medicaid enrollees with a diagnosis of ASD. Using ASD as the pilot research program, teams at CMS and NIH will establish a secure tech-enabled mechanism to enhance this data sharing with timely, privacy and security compliant data exchange. This pilot research program will inform continued development of a landmark NIH platform to ultimately be used by researchers in understanding healthcare utilization, chronic disease etiology and treatment, and the economic burden of chronic conditions.”