A few months ago, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) launched the USCDI+ initiative to support the identification and establishment of domain or program-specific datasets that will operate as extensions to the existing United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI). Recently, our colleagues at the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) saw an opportunity to leverage USCDI+ and we have now launched a new USCDI+ collaboration to support HRSA’s Uniform Data System (UDS) reporting through the UDS Modernization Initiative.

The drug overdose crisis in the United States continues to expand – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that more than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021, an increase of nearly 15% from 93,655 deaths estimated in 2020.

The moments we’ve all been waiting for since 2016 are fast approaching: the 21st Century Cures Act infrastructure is coming into place in 2022! The Cures Act laid out a vision for a rich health IT ecosystem of standards-based APIs and nationwide health information networks to securely open up electronically accessible information to patients themselves and to health care professionals supporting their care. As we’ve discussed in previous blogs, progress on nationwide network integration via TEFCA continues apace, and starting on October 6, all actors covered by the information blocking provisions of the Cures Act will be required to make available the full scope of electronic health information to other authorized parties. In this blog, we’re going to focus on the upcoming deadlines for availability of standards-based FHIR APIs.

The pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed gaps in the nation’s public health infrastructure that pose challenges to effective communication between health care providers and public health agencies.  According to ONC analyses of nationally representative survey data from hospitals and physicians collected in 2019, over 70% of hospitals experienced at least one major challenge with electronic public health reporting and less than 1 in 5 primary care physicians—and about a quarter of pediatric and internal medicine primary care physicians—reported electronically exchanging data with public health agencies. It is important to note that ONC’s analysis did not report on physicians’ overall levels of public health reporting—which often occur through manual, paper-based methods—nor does it reflect recent levels of electronic public health reporting which may have improved during the pandemic. Moreover, low rates of electronic reporting may be due, in part, to variation in jurisdictional requirements (i.e., most jurisdictions do not require electronic data submission for public health reporting) as well as PHAs’ capacity to electronically receive standardized data from physicians and hospitals.

Are non-English-speaking patients seen as quickly in the emergency department (ED) as English-speaking patients? If not, is this gap limited to certain non-English languages, or is it consistent across all non-English languages? Is this gap consistent on weekdays? Is it more pronounced on weekends?