ONC’s Cures Act Final Rule

ONC’s Cures Act Final Rule implements the interoperability requirements outline in the 21st Century Cures Act and is designed to give patients and their healthcare providers secure access to electronic health information. It increases innovation and competition by fostering an ecosystem of new applications to provide patients with more choices in their health care.

It calls on the healthcare industry to adopt standardized application programming interfaces (APIs), which will help allow individuals to securely and easily access structured electronic health information using smartphone applications.

The rule includes a provision requiring that patients can electronically access all of their electronic health information (EHI), structured and/or unstructured, at no cost.

Finally, to further support access and exchange of EHI, the rule implements the information blocking provisions of the 21st Century Cures Act. There are nine exceptions to the definition of information blocking.