Jeff Smith
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Jeff Smith's Latest Blog Posts
An Upcoming Milestone in Our Interoperability Journey
Jeff Smith | March 3, 2022
It’s going to be a busy year – a really busy year. In 2022, much of the promise of the 21st Century Cures Act comes to certified health IT near you.
ONC dutifully monitors industry progress towards certification to the 2015 Edition Cures Update (Cures Update), which introduces new standards and functionalities that will benefit our health care system in a variety of ways. This includes improved interoperability through secure, standards-based application programming interfaces (APIs) and the United States Core Data for Interoperability Version 1 (USCDI v1);
Shining a Light on FHIR Implementation: Progress Toward Publishing FHIR Endpoints
Jeff Smith | February 1, 2022
Using APIs “without Special Effort”
The ONC’s Cures Act Final Rule (Cures Rule) supports patients’ and providers’ access to electronic health information (EHI) through Health Level Seven (HL7®) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) application programming interfaces (APIs). FHIR is ready for prime-time and the Cures Rule requires certain developers of certified health IT to provide a certified, FHIR API to their customer base by December 31, 2022.
Read Full Post.Calling all Beta Testers: New Opportunity to help ONC Update the Inferno Test Tool
Jeff Smith | January 27, 2022
Beginning March 2022, Inferno, ONC’s test tool for the “standardized API for patient and population services” certification criterion, will support beta testing for the Health Level Seven (HL7®) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) US Core Implementation Guide (IG) 4.0.0. This new version is expected to include several enhancements from version 3.1.1 and we’re looking for early feedback from health IT developers who are interested in using the new version in the future as part of Inferno testing.
Read Full Post.Aligning with Standards Development Community: The New Cycle for Standards Version Advancement Process
Jeff Smith | October 15, 2021
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.
Read Full Post.A New Window into How Certified Health IT Is Being Used
Jeff Smith | July 15, 2021
In section 3009A of the 21st Century Cures Act of 2016 (Cures Act), Congress created the “Electronic Health Record Reporting Program” and required health IT developers participating in the ONC Health IT Certification Program to publicly report certain information about their certified health IT products consistent with a new “condition of maintaining certification.” The goal of this program is to bolster market competitiveness by making publicly available comparative information on the capabilities and uses of certified EHR systems.
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