Health Information Exchange The Digital Health Divide for Populations that have been Marginalized
Jordan Everson | November 13, 2023
Many hospitals have adopted systems for interoperable patient data exchange and are connected to national networks. However, ONC has consistently found that rates of interoperable exchange for smaller, rural, and independent hospitals have notably lagged behind other hospitals. For example, in both 2017 and 2021, rural hospitals were 23 percentage points less likely to engage in interoperable exchange compared to urban hospitals. In a recent study, ONC explored this digital divide to better understand the relationship between interoperable exchange and measures of hospitals that served populations that have been marginalized.
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TEFCA Coming in Hot! TEFCA Will Soon Be Live and Add Support for FHIR-Based Exchange
Mark Knee | November 3, 2023
In January 2022, ONC and The Sequoia Project, serving as ONC’s Recognized Coordinating Entity® (RCETM) organization, released the Trusted Exchange Framework and Version 1 of the Common Agreement. One year later, six organizations became candidate Qualified Health Information NetworksTM (QHINsTM) and committed to complete “onboarding” and “go live” by the end of 2023 – we are still on target!
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Information Blocking Consequences for Information Blocking: New Proposals to Establish Disincentives for Health Care Providers
Micky Tripathi | October 30, 2023
A new proposed rule released today by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) details HHS’ first steps for holding health care providers accountable for information blocking under the 21st Century Cures Act (Cures Act). Specifically, the “21st Century Cures Act: Establishment of Disincentives for Health Care Providers That Have Committed Information Blocking” proposed rule proposes to establish a department-wide regulatory framework for managing disincentives and proposes an initial set of appropriate disincentives in Centers for Medicare &
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Health Information Exchange, Privacy and Security Patient Preferences with Social Needs Information Sharing
Catherine Strawley | October 26, 2023
Screening for patients’ health-related social needs can help providers more effectively coordinate patient care and connect patients to the resources they need. Social needs are social conditions—such as food insecurity, housing instability, and lack of reliable transportation—which often result from underlying social determinants of health and can adversely affect health outcomes if left unaddressed. While studies show that patients are generally comfortable with social needs screening, little is known about patients’ comfort or preferences around how social needs data are captured and shared with other providers and service organizations to inform treatment and care coordination.
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Interoperability 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.