ONC’s newly appointed national coordinator Micky Tripathi introduced the 2021 ONC Annual Meeting by sharing his vision for the future of health IT strategy and policy throughout the healthcare system. He talked about the agency’s role in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, striving for health equity through the use of health IT (he calls it “equity by design”), advancing interoperability of health information, and reducing the burden of health IT on clinicians. 

Enacted by Congress over four years ago through Section 4004 of the 21st Century Cures Act (Cures Act) and implemented through a final rule released over one year ago, the time has come for the benefits of the Cures Act’s information blocking provision to swing into full gear. 

Health IT has helped drive progress in health care over the last decade, but it has also introduced a variety of different challenges, many reported by the clinical community. As we explored in our latest article published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, ONC and other federal partners have taken and continue to take steps to reduce clinician burden when using health IT. 

Today’s health information ecosystem is broadening in terms of participants and data availability. The data sources that exist to inform clinical and biomedical research are more diverse than ever, drawing from electronic health records (EHRs), genomic tests, recordings from wearable devices, and patient surveys, to name a few. The insights that can be drawn from these require effective data collection, aggregation, and sharing in addition to health IT infrastructure capable of supporting research goals. To address some of these requirements, ONC has been focused on accelerating an ecosystem that uses standardized, application programming interfaces (APIs). 

ONC released new data on the methods hospitals used to exchange summary of care records in 2019. More than half of hospitals engaged in all four domains of interoperability (e.g., send, receive, find, integrate). The percent of hospitals with the capability to integrate data into their electronic health record (EHR) increased by nearly 15 percent from 2018. View the complete brief, Use of Certified Health IT and Methods to Enable Interoperability by U.S. Non-Federal Acute Care Hospitals, 2019.