Wes Barker
- Health IT Buzz
- Articles by: Wes Barker
Wes Barker's Latest Blog Posts
Checking In on Hospital EHR APIs: Can Providers and Patients Access and Share Health Data via Apps?
Wes Barker | September 11, 2023
Thanks to a decade of effort, nearly every U.S. hospital today stores health data electronically. To put that data to work, however, clinicians and patients need to be able to access and appropriately share that data.
To implement the 21st Century Cures Act and help meet those needs, ONC’s Health IT Certification Program adopted new requirements and standards for application programming interfaces (APIs) that support the secure exchange of patient data between electronic health records (EHRs) apps.
Lantern: Lighting the Way on FHIR Implementation
Wes Barker | 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.New Data on Clinician Performance and Use of Certified Health IT for Promoting Interoperability
Wes Barker | August 1, 2023
New data for clinicians reporting for Promoting Interoperability in 2019, 2020, and 2021 and their use of certified health IT are now available on healthit.gov/data. These represent an update to the data published through 2016 and representative of eligible professionals who participated in “Meaningful Use.” The data can be linked to the ONC Certified Health IT Product List (CHPL) and other HHS and industry health care datasets.
This data release is a long time coming.
Physicians have Widespread Access to State PDMP Data, but Data Sharing Varies Across States
Wes Barker | April 6, 2023
A recent ONC blog post showed physicians have widespread access to data from their state’s prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP). According to a 2021 national survey of office-based physicians, more than three-quarters of physician prescribers reported checking the PDMP prior to prescribing controlled substances to a patient for the first time. Prescriber use laws and ongoing efforts to integrate electronic health record (EHR) systems with state PDMPs likely contributed to high levels of PDMP use among physicians.
Read Full Post.Use of Telemedicine among Physicians and Development of Telemedicine Apps
Wes Barker | March 9, 2023
In 2020, as the U.S. health care system faced the unprecedented challenge of combating the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine emerged as an invaluable care delivery tool; both providers and patients heavily relied on it for providing and receiving care. Through an analysis of National Electronic Health Record Survey (NEHRS) 2021 data and from in-house data collected from electronic health record (EHR) developers’ app galleries, we have an opportunity to inform the public about physicians’ experiences with telemedicine during the pandemic.
Read Full Post.