Wei Chang
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Wei Chang's Latest Blog Posts
National Survey Reveals New Insights on Health Information Organizations
Wei Chang | January 7, 2025
Health information exchange organizations (HIOs) are networks that enable the electronic exchange of health information across participating health care providers, public health agencies, payers, and other entities. They also have a unique, wide-angle lens on the state of interoperability nationwide. Since 2020, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy (ASTP) has partnered with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the Civitas Networks for Health (Civitas) to survey HIOs. We recently published a number of studies from the most recent survey,
Read Full Post.Lantern: Lighting the Way on FHIR Implementation
Wei Chang | August 14, 2023
Turning Evidence into Action
The ONC Cures Act Final Rule (Cures Rule) supports patients’ and providers’ access to electronic health information through Health Level Seven (HL7®) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) application programming interfaces (APIs). To ensure that secure, standardized FHIR APIs certified through the ONC Health IT Certification Program can be accessed and used “without special effort,” the Cures Rule included a requirement to ensure that app developers could readily lookup the service base URLs (i.e.,
Read Full Post.Hospitals Collect and Receive Social Needs Data, but Usage Varies
Wei Chang | July 31, 2023
If left unaddressed, the social needs experienced by an individual may lead to poor health outcomes and more time spent in hospitals and interacting with the health care system. Hospitals, therefore, are uniquely situated to help address social needs and mitigate social risk factors by screening for social needs, assisting with transitions of care, and making connections to social service organizations. According to a recent ONC analysis of data from the 2022 American Hospital Association (AHA) Information Technology Supplement Survey,
Read Full Post.Where APIs meet Health Equity by Design: Introducing the FHIRedApp Health Innovation
Wei Chang | October 18, 2022
With a heightened focus on health equity throughout our work, ONC has adopted the concept of “health equity by design.” Along those lines, health IT can, and should, be used to better identify and mitigate disparities while enhancing opportunities for underrepresented populations. In 2019, under the Leading Edge Acceleration Projects (LEAP) for Health IT program, ONC funded the University of Texas at Austin’s Dell Medical School (Dell Med) to design,
Read Full Post.An Innovative Program to Expand the Use of HIE Data for Patient-Centered Outcomes Research
Wei Chang | July 26, 2022
ONC is excited to announce “Using Machine Learning Techniques to Enable Health Information Exchange to Support COVID-19-Focused PCOR,” a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) Trust Fund project implementing new technologies and standards to unlock the potential for health information exchanges (HIEs) to support research.
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