Standards

Portrait of Mike Berry

ONC’s Health Information Technology Advisory Committee: A Year in Review and a Look Ahead

Mike Berry | March 9, 2022

The Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC) plays an important role in ONC activities and objectives. Required by the 21st Century Cures Act, the HITAC has been operational since 2018 and represents a wide range of health IT stakeholders who inform ONC’s policies and programs.

Read Full Post.
Portrait of John Bender

Inferno Redesigned: Easier, Faster, Extensible

John Bender | March 8, 2022

ONC is excited to announce the launch of the Inferno Framework and the (g)(10) Standardized API Test Kit, the new version of the testing method for the § 170.315(g)(10) criterion in the ONC Health IT Certification Program (Certification Program). This new edition of Inferno is the product of a continued evolution of health IT standards testing and is designed to be more useful for health IT developers and easier for the health IT community to leverage for different types of standards conformance testing.

Read Full Post.
Portrait of Jeff Smith

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);

Read Full Post.
Portrait of Wes Barker

Shining a Light on FHIR Implementation: Progress Toward Publishing FHIR Endpoints

Wes Barker | 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.
Portrait of John Bender

Calling all Beta Testers: New Opportunity to help ONC Update the Inferno Test Tool

John Bender | 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.