ONC recently published two data briefs that explore the current state of patient electronic access to health information. These briefs provide new insights into the adoption of secure, standards-based APIs by hospitals, and their subsequent use by patients via their smartphone health apps.

When President Obama signed the bipartisan 21st Century Cures Act (Cures Act) into law in 2016, it marked a significant shift in health policy and health law. Not since the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) has there been a more noteworthy change in how electronic health information (EHI) is approached under United States federal law. Importantly, the Cures Act’s information blocking provision should always be considered in the context of other laws that speak to how EHI is shared in health care.

What should 2030 look like because of interoperability? That’s what we asked our stakeholders back in May 2021. And boy, did you all deliver! We received an overwhelming number of submissions, north of 700 one-liners, from Twitter and HealthIT.gov. We even got video submissions from leaders in the field – thank you again!

In a field like health care where precision can mean saving a life, one irony I often reflect on is how unclear we’ve been about “sex” and “gender.” Among many anecdotes, this includes at times putting the prefix “administrative” in front of each to inexplicably constrain the meaning in ways that are rarely universally understood.

As part of ONC’s ongoing charge to coordinate across federal and industry stakeholders, we determined it was necessary to adjust our Standards Version Advancement Process (SVAP) timeline. Although it may seem like this process has been around for a while, it’s still brand new and we’ve been looking at ways to optimize how the process aligns with other standards development work in the community. The changes we’ve made will help ensure timely publication of implementation specifications central to our cadence for new versions of USCDI.