Dive Brief:
- On Friday, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) announced a proposed 2015 Edition Health IT Certification Criteria rule, which will focus heavily on interoperability.
- The new rule came at the same time that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced the proposed criteria that eligible professionals, hospitals and critical access hospitals will need to meet in order to qualify for stage 3 meaningful use incentives.
- Both rules are scheduled to be published on March 30.
Dive Insight:
"ONC's proposed rule will be an integral component in the shared nationwide effort to achieve an interoperable health system," said Karen DeSalvo, MD, national coordinator for health IT. "The certification criteria we have proposed in the 2015 Edition will help achieve that vision through provisions that consider the range of health IT users and uses across the care continuum, including those focused on interoperable standards, data portability, improved transparency, privacy and security capabilities, and increased oversight through ONC's Health IT Certification Program."
The new rule lists nine priorities, lead by the need for "new and updated vocabulary and content standards for the structured recording and exchange of health information, including a Common Clinical Data Set composed primarily of data expressed using adopted standards."
The rule also demands the use of the Health Level 7 exchange standard Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (C-CDA) and emphasizes data exchange through "application programming interface capabilities," or APIs.