This past Monday the Department of Health and Human Services finalized two rules through its agencies regarding healthcare and patient access to digital data. Both of the rules meet requirements that were outlined in the 2016 bill, the 21st Century Cures Act.
CMS Rule
Regarding patient access and interoperability, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released their final rule for government health plans to share claims information with patients. The new requirement will take effect on January 1st, 2021 and will allow patients to access their data through an API. The API will work through third party, patient-facing applications, and will also be able to integrate the information with a patient’s electronic health record.
Similar to a law we discussed in Florida regarding notification requirements, CMS is also requiring hospitals that participate in Medicare and Medicaid to send notifications to primary providers when patients are admitted, discharged, or transferred to or from a hospital.
States are also on the hook with this new law, being required to send daily enrollee data starting in April of 2022 to ensure that eligible citizens are getting the appropriate access to services and that they are billed appropriately.
ONC Rule
Separately, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) finalized a rule regarding information blocking. This rule is designed to prevent healthcare providers and healthcare technology companies from unnecessarily walling off information while still allowing companies to control some proprietary information.
This rule also has API requirements, which will allow patients to obtain their health information from their provider without cost using a third-party smartphone app. This is designed to give patients increased ownership and control over their healthcare similar to the way they manage other aspects of their life like finances.
EHRs must provide not only patient data to patients, but they’re also required to provide necessary clinical data to promote new care models and advance the set of standardized health information laid out in the U.S. Core Data for Interoperability project.
How these rules will play out has been a contentious topic over the past few months as EHR vendor Epic Systems and sixty-six of its clients sent a letter opposing the rule. While interoperability is a noble end goal, these new rules do raise concerns over the privacy of patient information. Epic plans to take their time reading through the extensive rules (The ONC’s final Cures Act Rule clocked in at 1,244 pages) before making any judgments, but is committed to creating meaningful interoperability.
On the other side of the argument, big tech companies like Apple and Google, but also rival EHR company Cerner, came out in support of the rule. The obvious benefit to the tech companies not currently working in healthcare is that the public APIs that Epic would need to release would be the start of a blueprint to recreating their software.
At Extract, we understand that before data can be shared freely, it must be captured correctly. We automate the manual data entry process and normalize the data being entered into your EHR so you always have an apples to apples comparison. If you’d like to learn more about our data extraction software, please reach
out today.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.