The Department of Health and Human Services has issued a challenge to solicit designs and approaches that will work to address concerns from patients about the clarity of medical bills.

HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell spoke at the Health Datapalooza conference regarding the “A Bill You Can Understand” design challenge, which seeks to boost patient experience in the medical billing process, the agency said Monday.

Burwell said the challenge works to build on HHS efforts to help patients manage their own healthcare and create a new medical bill that will “simplify” the billing process in a way that is understandable to patients, doctors, hospitals and insurance companies.

AARP and Mad Pow have worked with HHS to administer the challenge and work to draw attention to the impact of medical billing to patients, HHS said.

Two winners — selected for the bill design and for a transformational approach to the medical billing system — will be featured on the challenge website and win $5,000 each as well as an opportunity to feature the designs at the Health 2.0 Annual Fall Conference in September.

The challenge is open until Aug. 10 and the winners will be announced in September.

Cambia Health Solutions, Geisinger Health System, INTEGRIS Health, The MetroHealth System, Providence Health & Services and the University of Utah Health Care have also committed to test or implement the winning designs for their patients, HHS added.

Patricia Flatley Brennan, a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has been appointed by National Institutes of Heath Director Francis Collins as the new director of the National Library of Medicine effective August.

“Patti brings her incredible experience of having cared for patients as a practicing nurse, improved the lives of home-bound patients by developing innovative information systems and services designed to increase their independence, and pursued cutting-edge research in data visualization and virtual reality,” Collins said in a release issued Wednesday.

Brennan was the Lillian L. Moehlman Bascom Professor at UW-Madison, the lead of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery’s living environments laboratory and a former American Medical Informatics Association president.

She has previously worked on the development of patient information systems such as HeartCare, an online information and communication service designed to support home-based cardiac patients, and ComputerLink, an electronic network that seeks to facilitate self-care for outpatients.

“This combination of skills makes her ideally suited to lead the NLM in the era of precision medicine,” added Collins.

NLM is the world’s largest biomedical library that maintains a range of print and electronic information, as well as supports and conducts biomedical and health informatics technology research, development, and training.

The Congressional Budget Office has added an online search tool on its website for users to find intergovernmental and private sector mandates in bills and public laws that are identified under the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act.

CBO said Tuesday the tool also features background information on the agency’s efforts under UMRA and replaces CBO’s annual report on UMRA activities that has been published for almost 20 years.

CBO said it analyzed 580 bills in 2015 and found 57 with intergovernmental mandates and 82 that have private sector mandates.

The agency added the tool covers data from calendar years 2013 through 2015 and will accommodate periodical additions throughout the year.

From that data, CBO created summary of UMRA activities in 2015 along with the search tool to identify 10 laws that contain intergovernmental mandates and 17 that contain industry mandates.

CBO says none of those laws with intergovernmental mandates in 2015 exceeded the $77 million threshold set by the UMRA law.

Six laws enacted in 2015 have eight mandates CBO estimated to have costs above the $154 million threshold for private sector mandates under UMRA.

A Federal Communications Commission task force will develop a planning framework and scorecard to support efforts by public safety agencies to shift their 911 systems to Internet Protocol-based platforms, Urgent Communications reported Tuesday.

Donny Jackson writes the FCC’s Task Force on Optimal Public Safety Answering Points Architecture held a webcast meeting to discuss the second phase of its effort after the release of a report earlier this year on cybersecurity, architecture transition and funding structures.

Jay English, chairman of the TFOPA cybersecurity group, told the publication meeting attendees supported the report’s focus on network security.

“We’re used to protecting data, but we’re not used to having to protect the entire enterprise, because we’ve never had to do it before,” said English.

He added education of personnel at public safety answering points can help support 911 network defense efforts, Urgent Communications said.