White House: Make our children healthy again

Summary

The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission has released its list of 128 recommendations and actions for health, agriculture and education departments and other federal departments it said will improve the health of U.S. children.

The strategy document includes calls to reorganise some health and research agencies, launch new studies into chronic disease, increase the availability of nutritional information, promote fitness and foster private sector collaboration while deregulating certain areas of food production and treatment approvals.

Content

FIERCE Healthcare highlights the most noteworthy recommendations for the healthcare and broader life sciences industries:

• Full implementation of hospital and insurer price transparency.
• Creation of a “mental health diagnosis and prescription working group” to review prescription patterns, potential harms and “over-prescription trends,” which will include new research and updated drug labels.
• Collaboration with states on prior authorization requirements and prescribing safeguards “to address the overuse of medications in school-age children—particularly for conditions such as ADHD”.
• New quality metrics centred on health outcomes as well as Medicaid managed care quality metrics “that promote measurable health improvements through nutrition coaching and other fitness indicators”.
• A new “vaccine framework” that focuses on vaccine injuries, transparency, “correcting conflicts of interest and misaligned incentives” and “ensuring scientific and medical freedom”.
• A National Institutes of Health (NIH) chronic disease research initiative that takes a whole-person-health approach to prevention.
• The creation of a real-world data platform at NIH linking data sources such as insurance claims, EHRs and wearables data.
• Leveraging the NIH’s longitudinal birth cohort data for chronic disease research and prevention.
• Expanded use of New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) at the NIH, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
• Promoting direct primary care model use with health savings accounts, as well as enrolment for those on high-deductible health plans.
• Increased enforcement and oversight of direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising—which was also cemented in a memorandum signed by President Donald Trump,
• Leveraging HHS funding toward community health programmes and partnerships.
• Requirements that HHS advisory committee members recuse themselves for financial conflicts of interest,
• New research into “the root causes of autism,” results from which HHS leaders previously said could come this year (with recent reports suggesting Tylenol use during pregnancy will be named as a potential cause).
• Public databases on the payments received by health researchers, "similar" to [the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’] Open Payments system for physicians.
• The creation of the Administration for a Healthy America, which would take several responsibilities around chronic health from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
• The launch of a new Office of Research Innovation, Validation and Application at the NIH, which will focus on shifting away from animal testing in favour of advanced techniques such as organoids, computational models and real-world health data analysis.
• The development of a new Office of Research Innovations, Planning and Analysis at the NIH, focused on disease-specific portfolio analysis and research prioritisation.
• Review participation in any projects funded by food or pharmaceutical companies through the CDC Foundation, Foundation for the NIH or the Reagan-Udall Foundation.
• Policies at the NIH limiting open access payments to scientific journals.
• Promoting nutrition in medical school curriculum.
• Supporting new medical education programme accreditors, “including those with a focus on treating the root causes of chronic disease”.
• Various educational programs on topics like screen time, paediatric mental health, fitness, pesticide review processes and “the appropriate levels of fluoride”.