Source: Healthcare Innovation
On July 10, The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), released the Health Data, Technology, and Interoperability: Patient Engagement, Information Sharing, and Public Health Interoperability (HTI-2) proposed rule for public comment. In a press release this Wednesday, HHS explained that the “HTI-2 proposed rule has two sets of new certification criteria designed to enable health IT for public health as well as health IT for payers to be certified under the ONC Health IT Certification Program.” “These new certification criteria, which would improve public health response and advance the delivery of value-based care, focus heavily on standards-based application programming interfaces to improve end-to-end interoperability between data exchange partners,” the release stated. In a press conference on Wednesday, Micky Tripathi, Ph.D., National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, shared, “We’ve been working really hard on making parts of our healthcare delivery value chain and public health value chain more and more electronic.”