Interoperability

Portrait of Catherine Strawley

Checking In on Hospital EHR APIs: Can Providers and Patients Access and Share Health Data via Apps?

Catherine Strawley | 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.

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Portrait of Wes Barker

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.,

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Portrait of Alex Mugge

Interoperability is a Team Sport

Alex Mugge | July 18, 2023

An interoperable U.S. healthcare system depends on collaboration across diverse groups inside and outside of government, working in a complex environment toward a common goal. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) play different but complementary roles to advance health data interoperability. ONC and CMS each lead regulatory and programmatic efforts to evolve the interoperability landscape, collaborating closely with each other and industry groups – payers,

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Portrait of Ashley Hain

ONC Publishes USCDI+ Quality Data Element List to Support CMS Digital Quality Measurement Modernization Initiative and Overall Quality Reporting

Ashley Hain | June 2, 2023

ONC recently released the draft USCDI+ Quality data element list for public comment on the eCQI Resource Center website. This release provides an initial, high-level picture of the USCDI+ initiative in action. It is a harmonized set of data elements for quality measurement that could be used to support measurement and reporting across a wide number of quality programs. ONC requests feedback on this draft list by 11:59pm ET on June 30,

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