2021 Posts

Federal Agencies Align to Promote Public Health Reporting

Elisabeth Myers | June 1, 2021

Recently, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed modifications to its Promoting Interoperability Program that, if finalized, would require hospitals to report on four public health and clinical data exchange measures. This proposal is the latest in a series of coordinated steps taken across HHS to leverage data standards and specifications adopted as part of ONC’s Health IT Certification Program to enable nationwide public health reporting.

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ONC Mentors + Computer Science Graduate Students + Inferno = Campus on FHIR

John Bender | May 20, 2021

To promote and support the consistent development and implementation of the Health Level Seven (HL7®) International® Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources® (FHIR®) standard and associated implementation guides, ONC launched the Inferno testing suite a few years back. Inferno supports the ONC Health IT Certification Program through a set of streamlined tests for software services seeking to meet the requirements of the 2015 Edition Cures Update’s “Standardized API for Patient and Population Services certification criterion” and also includes a “community” aspect to it,

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Health Interoperability Outcomes 2030

Steven Posnack | May 13, 2021

One of the fun parts about working at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is that in addition to our impactful, near-term work, we also have the chance to point our eyes to the horizon and envision a better future. Throughout my tenure at ONC, different policy, technology, and legislative moments along with ample public feedback have shaped our actions. Yet, there always comes a time to ask, “what’s next? what are we driving toward?

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Women’s Health and Implementing the 21st Century Cures Act

Lisa-Nicole Sarnowski | May 12, 2021

As we celebrate Women’s Health Week, we wanted to share some of the ways that ONC’s work directly impacts women of all ages, in every part of the country. ONC published a strategy in October 2020 that outlined federal health IT goals and objectives, with a focus on individuals’ access to their electronic health information. One step in achieving some of these goals is through the implementation of ONC’s Cures Act Final Rule, which advanced policies to improve the access,

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Information Blocking Through the Eyes of Health Information Exchanges

Vaishali Patel | May 10, 2021

The information blocking regulations at 45 CFR Part 171 began to apply to health care providers, health IT developers of certified health IT, health information exchanges, and health information networks on April 5, 2021, per ONC’s recent interim final rule. That makes now a good time to consider stakeholders’ views about practices that may constitute information blocking, including the extent to which they exist. Our recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association reports on a survey of health information exchanges’ (HIEs) perceptions of other stakeholders’ practices related to information blocking.

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