“The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has finalized two interoperability rules to give patients direct access to their healthcare data. The first provisions of the rule will impact healthcare systems in as soon as six months.”
“The two rules, issued by the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), were announced last year, and the final rules were issued today. They are expected to ’empower patients around a common aim—giving every American access to their medical information so they can make better healthcare decisions,’ according to a release issued by CMS…”
“‘Americans will now have electronic access to their health information on their smartphone if they choose,’ said ONC National Coordinator Don Rucker, MD, during a White House media briefing this morning. ‘Our rule requires hospitals and doctors to provide software access points—end points, if you will—to their electronic medical record databases so that patients can download these records to their smartphones.’”
“One key deadline for health systems occurs six months from today, said CMS Administrator Seema Verma. ‘We are changing the conditions of participation for hospitals to ensure Medicare- and Medicaid-participating hospitals are supporting care coordination for patients by sending admission, discharge, and transfer notifications so patients receive a timelier follow up, supporting better care and better health outcomes,’ she said.”
“The CMS rule also impacts payers. Starting in 2021, Verma said, ‘all health plans doing business in Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and the federal exchanges [must] share their health data with their patients through a secure standards-based API (application programming interface), which represents the link between the data on various systems and [the] consumer’s phone.’”
“…HHS Secretary Alex Azar said he expects the rules to spawn a new era of innovation in healthcare. ‘We hope to see a whole ecosystem of condition- or disease-specific apps to help patients monitor and improve their health in real time, in part, by using data made available from their electronic health record via an API,’ said Azar…” Read the full article here.
Source: HHS Releases Final Interoperability Rules – By Mandy Roth, March 9, 2020. HealthLeaders.
