The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has had a busy year supporting public health agencies during the COVID-19 response, working to improve health equity, improving electronic health record standards adoption and continuing to hammer away at information blocking regulations, as complaints against providers and health IT vendors roll in. The ball on information blocking enforcement is already rolling, as the ONC receives hundreds of complaints, mostly from patients, accusing actors of blocking the free flow of health data. But the HHS has yet to finalize long-awaited penalties against providers and vendors found guilty of information blocking, which are some of the final hurdles in implementing the information blocking tenets of the 21st Century Cures Act, passed in 2016 to try to improve the free flow of health data in the U.S.

December 1st is World AIDS Day, when we collectively remember those who died due to AIDS-related illnesses and renew our commitment to work together to end the HIV epidemic and support people with HIV. This year’s theme, “Putting Ourselves to the Test: Achieving Equity to End HIV,” emphasizes accountability and action. Collaborative, community-based, cross sector, and whole-of-government approaches that address clinical and social determinants of health (SDOH) are needed to support communities disproportionally affected by HIV and achieve national HIV/AIDS goals. Interoperable health IT, with health equity as a fundamental design feature, is an important tool to enable these efforts.

As we approach 2023 it is amazing that interoperability, true broad-based connectivity between healthcare systems, looks like the Verizon heatmap back in 2005 when there was as much white on the map as there was red.  Much like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile worked diligently to provide coverage to everyone in the U.S., TEFCA (Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement) is driving the QHIN “network” to accomplish the same outcome.  Depending on where you sit in healthcare today it may feel like 1986 or 2023.  The breadth of connectivity, the exchange of data, and the benefit of both feels significantly different depending on where you sit inside the healthcare ecosystem.  We are confident that this disparity in coverage will change quickly as QHIN’s, their participants and sub-participants see the benefits of nationwide coverage.  Today nobody can seem to survive without their cell phone, tomorrow no one in healthcare will tolerate a disconnected system any longer. 

CHAI’s mission, according to the organization, is to provide guidelines for the ever-evolving landscape of health AI tools to ensure high quality care, increase credibility amongst users, and meet healthcare needs. The coalition serves to identify where standards, best practices, and guidance need to be developed for AI-related research, technology, and policy. CHAI was formed by Change Healthcare, Duke AI Health, Google, Johns Hopkins University, Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, MITRE, Stanford Medicine, UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and others, and is being observed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT.

ONC launched the Strengthening the Technical Advancement and Readiness of Public Health Agencies via Health Information Exchange (STAR HIE) Program in 2020 using funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act). The program was expanded in 2021 to increase support for efforts to improve vaccination data sharing between jurisdictional Immunization Information Systems (IIS) and HIEs. The West Virginia Health Information Network (WVHIN) was among the 22 recipients that received a combined $20 million in funds from ONC via the CARES Act.