The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), State of California, and Utah Division of Consumer Protection recently filed a sweeping complaint against telemedicine company Hims & Hers Health, Inc., using federal and state consumer-protection laws to assert allegations against its direct-to-consumer telehealth business. The case is notable as regulators are not relying on a traditional health-privacy statute but rather general consumer-protection laws to challenge health-data advertising practices and aspects of Hims’s subscription model.
Health Law Scan
Legal Insights and Perspectives for the Healthcare Industry
Digital health—that is, medical care enhanced or made possible by the use of technology—has changed the landscape of healthcare in America. Innovation in this sector is at an all-time high and 2024 will no doubt see greater expansion and acceptance of digital health within the care continuum.
Healthcare providers are scrambling to understand the impacts of the May 11 expiration of the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE). Luckily for most telehealth providers, the outlook of their operations post-PHE is relatively clear.
On February 9, 2022, US Senators Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) introduced bipartisan legislation designed to modernize health privacy laws, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), and account for emerging healthcare technologies not addressed by existing law.
As the availability and variety of digital health tools continue to increase, evidence is also being presented that those tools are having a meaningful impact on health outcomes. In a recent blog post, members of our technology, outsourcing, and commercial transactions team dove into the findings of two reports, Digital Health Trends 2021: Innovation, Evidence, Regulation, and Adoption, offered by the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science; and a report from the University of Michigan’s Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation’s Telehealth Research Incubator.