With help from Arthur Allen (@arthurallen202) and Mohana Ravindranath (@ravindranize)

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JOBS: On Wednesday, executive jobs with important effects on health IT got filled:

— Cerner CEO: Cerner has a new CEO: Brent Shafer, formerly the chief executive of Philips North America. Shafer is the permanent replacement for Neal Patterson, who passed in July.

Shafer steps into the top job at the Kansas City vendor at an interesting time: the company is handling a massive implementation of the Department of Defense’s new EHR, and is concluding negotiations over the Department of Veterans’ Affairs electronic health records system. Both of those contracts, together, are likely to account for more than a decade’s worth of work for the company and billions of dollars in revenue.

Managing those installations will likely be the most high-profile work conducted by the company in the near-term future, which — along with its rival, Epic — is exercising increasing dominance over the consolidating EHR market.

— And ONC: After a three month hiatus, ONC named a new chief privacy officer, Kathryn Marchesini, who previously served with both the Office for Civil Rights and in the privacy division of ONC since 2010. Marchesini’s former colleague, Lucia Savage, praised her experience of HIPAA. (Karen DeSalvo called it a “Great choice!” on twitter.)

Marchesini has been an active contributor to academic journals, co-authoring a 2016 article on patient willingness to exchange data over mobile devices in the Annals of Family Medicine, to take one example.

AND ON THE HILL: Here’s what’s happening on Congress:

Committee shuffle: Rep. Pete Roskam is the new chair of the Ways and Means health subcommittee. Roskam himself hasn’t been active on digital health issues, but the subcommittee is an important chokepoint for the sector. The previous chair was Pat Tiberi, who’s retiring.

— Issa retiring: Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, is also retiring. Issa was one of the founders of the Congressional Internet of Things caucus, and took an interest in health care technology from time to time.

— Net neutrality repeal: Mostly Democrats, and a few Republicans, are considering repealing the FCC’s recent net neutrality rules by the Congressional Review Act. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer convened a meeting with several liberal-leaning groups about the idea, and some Republicans are making positive noises about backing it. Sen. Susan Collins is signed on, and John Kennedy is considering it, our Tech colleagues reported Wednesday.

eHealth tweet of the day: Stephanie M. Lee @stephaniemlee “to whoever stole my umbrella during #jpm18: may your next clinical trial fail to be statistically significant”

THURSDAY: Your correspondent is writing this newsletter while listening to Stevie Wonder’s “Do I Do.” What should your correspondent have been listening to? Inundate him with recommendations, musical or otherwise, at dtahir@politico.com. Discuss music on social media at @ravindranize, @athurallen202, @DariusTahir, @POLITICOPro, @Morning_eHealth.

T-MSIS TRUDGING ALONG: T-MSIS, the long-lagging data project to ingest vast amounts of Medicaid information very rapidly, is making solid progress – but still short of its overall goals, a report from the Government Accountability Office concludes. Only Wisconsin and Missouri were failing to report any data to the database as of November 2017, a big improvement from October 2016, when only 18 states were reporting.

But while the program is taking in 97 percent of possible patients’ data, the quality of that information is still lacking: some states aren’t reporting the full complement of data, and some officials worry that information isn’t very comparable between states.
T-MSIS’s progress has been slower than steady for years. As our colleague David Pittman pointed out last June, the program was supposed to encompass every state back in July 2014.

RURAL BROADBAND EXECUTIVE ORDER: The Trump administration is awfully busy with executive orders this week. The president signed one urging the federal government to streamline regulations that might burden rural broadband projects. The order includes a specific section about locating such projects on federal property, and features an allusion to rural health care needs.

SABOTAGE?: Early during congressional repeal efforts, the Trump administration had already compiled a list of executive actions intended to radically alter Obamacare — and “sabotage” it, says Sen. Bob Casey, who shared the list with our colleague Jen Haberkorn. Pros can read the rest here.

ANOTHER JPM UPDATE: Despite the company’s struggles over the past year, Jonathan Bush is still excited about athenahealth’s technological marvels. The firm is interested in digitizing and analyzing the paper forms that a medical practice processes at the front desk, including drug registry reporting and inbound clinical messages. On Wednesday at the JP Morgan conference in San Francisco, he projected eliminating “several dollars of practice costs, per patient” in coming years.

Athenahealth also plans to expand a service similar to restaurant reservation site OpenTable, but for doctor and patient appointments, he added. “The idea of bringing the calendar of the doctor into the retail shopping environment of the internet is so bloody obvious.” (Your correspondent asks probably naively: isn’t that Zocdoc?)

— And also: Surprisingly, interoperability isn’t the most pressing problem for leaders like Rod Hochman, CEO of Providence St. Joseph Health, the nation’s third-largest not-for-profit hospital system, our Health colleague Dan Diamond reports. It’s the workforce.

Interoperabilty is the “old story,” he said; the more pressing need is in analytics. Filling those needs requires lots and lots of data scientists to build tools to review hospitals’ performance and uncover trends, at a much higher rate than they already do.

“We should be hiring them like they’re going out of style,” Hochman said, adding that he plans to do exactly that. His Seattle-based system pulls from a hiring pool of data experts that includes Amazon and Microsoft veterans.

DOJ INDICTS ALLEGED HACKER: The Department of Justice has indicted an Ohio hacker who allegedly snuck into thousands of Americans’ personal computers and stole vast amounts of personal records — including their medical records, they announced Wednesday.

INACTION ON COPY-AND-PASTE: Despite a lot of discussion about the safety problems arising from unthinking copy-and-pasting of previous medical notes, there aren’t too many efforts to correct the problem, Shannon Dean, the chief medical information officer at the University of Wisconsin-Health, writes in AHRQ’s Perspectives on Safety section.

Dean calls the persistent recycling of notes — despite the cavils on the subject — a “blot on our profession” arising from “complacency.” There are several tools that could correct or mitigate the problem, “I am aware of very few organizations that are actively using these tools to educate and mentor clinicians in a systematic way to improve documentation quality. Moreover, little has been written about documentation improvement initiatives that address copy and paste.”

Dean worries that the medical profession is sliding towards “acceptance” of the practice, which would be quite a shame.

— Also in research: The number-one most-read article in Health Affairs in 2017? “Direct-To-Consumer Telehealth May Increase Access To Care But Does Not Decrease Spending,” by J. Scott Ashwood of RAND Corporation et al.

WHAT WE’RE CLICKING ON:

—Pennsylvania’s prescription drug monitoring program is having success, per Pennsylvania officials.

—Sean Duffy, of Omada Health, asks in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine: what if in-person visits were a second- or third-option in health care?

—Embattled eClinicalWorks is rolling out a voice assistant to help doctors document.

—A question from up north: who owns patients’ tissue in Canada?