Health IT

Portrait of Donna Davidson

Addressing the Opioid Crisis and Beyond Through Health IT Advancements: The Role of PDMPs

Donna Davidson | March 21, 2023

Combatting the opioid epidemic has long been an HHS priority, and the department provides resources and technical assistance to states, health care providers, and other interested parties to assist in their efforts to address the crisis. ONC helps address the opioid epidemic through its support for the adoption of health IT and promotion of nationwide health information exchange, including through opportunities created by prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs). The significance of this work is evident,

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Portrait of Jawanna Henry

FHIRed-SHIP: An approach to Health Equity by Design for 21st Century Healthcare

Jawanna Henry | March 2, 2023

Complete and accurate information on a patient’s social determinants of health (SDOH), including specific needs related to food, housing, and transportation insecurity, can help their clinicians and social services providers take a more holistic approach to an individual’s health and well-being. In order to meet demand for an extensive number of SDOH use cases, the healthcare ecosystem is working intensely to mature SDOH data exchange standards. In parallel, it is important for continued investment in the use of these standards to test them out and to develop innovative methods that can enhance the comprehensiveness of health IT systems and improve care referrals and bi-directional exchange across organizations.

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Portrait of Jawanna Henry

Is Health IT Ready for Social Determinants of Health-Focused Clinical Decision Support?

Jawanna Henry | February 15, 2023

In a brief titled The Feasibility of Social Determinants of Health Clinical Decision Support, ONC explores how clinical practice guidelines that include social determinants of health (SDOH) factors present an opportunity to advance health equity and improve health outcomes. A standardized approach to clinical decision support (CDS) using SDOH factors can enable clinical practice guidelines to become part of routine care delivery. Such an approach has the potential for broad implementation in a variety of settings and with various systems.

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Portrait of Rob Anthony

Achieving a Major Milestone: Health IT Developers Certify to Cures Update

Rob Anthony | February 10, 2023

ONC is delighted to report that on December 31, 2022, the health IT community passed a major milestone on the road to improving health IT interoperability. More than 95 percent of Certified Health IT developers met the compliance deadline to update and provide their customers with new technology including requirements to enable access to information through application programming interfaces (APIs) “without special effort.”

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