Dr. Don Rucker presented at the 2020 HIT Conference in his capacity as the National Coordinator for Health IT at the ONC. To view the video recording of the entire session, please click here.
Highlights from Dr. Rucker:
The pandemic has brought national awareness of the need for accessible, actionable health information. As the healthcare industry looks forward to possible solutions, the role of HIEs looks to be paramount on the road to interoperability. The ONC expects HIEs and data sharing agreements to grow with strong support and incentives from the federal level.
The ONC interoperability rule is an effort to achieve the goals of the CURES Act, which contains three major directives that affect the health IT sphere. They are as follows:
- Prohibitions against information blocking
- A requirement for application programming interfaces “without special effort”
- Creation of a common framework for HIE information exchange (HIE to HIE)
To read more about the interoperability rule and information blocking, click here.
“We believe the ONC interoperability rule is a very pro-public initiative,” said Dr. Rucker when speaking of the project. Elements like the introduction of a data standard built for population analysis rather than individual queries is meant to help healthcare providers gain the flexibility and capability to get more actionable information on their patient population and improve the quality of care.
The Q&A portion of Dr. Rucker’s presentation included questions on the HIT Certification Program, the current timeline on the interoperability rule, telehealth data standardization, and more. To skip directly to the Q&A video recording, please click here.