The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate among high-income countries. To address this maternal health crisis, there has been an increased focus on improving health outcomes related to pregnancy and making maternal health a national priority. This is reflected in national maternal health initiatives, like the White House Blueprint for Addressing the Maternal Health Crisis. Goal 3 of the Blueprint focuses on advancing data collection, standardization, harmonization, transparency, and research.

Putting punishments in place for providers that block the exchange of electronic health information has been a complex and yearslong project for the HHS. In 2020, the Trump administration finalized regulations that officially barred information blocking, enacting key stipulations of the 21st Century Cures Act passed four years prior. The law included punishment for health IT vendors that are found information blocking — fines of up to $1 million per violation, which the HHS put in place last year — but included no such roadmap for guilty providers. As a result, regulators had difficulty landing on concrete disincentives for providers, which are the entities most frequently blamed for information blocking. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, which oversees U.S. health IT, has received roughly a thousand claims of possible information blocking since April 2021. The vast majority accuse providers of blocking data exchange. The new HHS final rule lays out penalties for providers participating in three federal quality programs.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today released a final rule that establishes disincentives for health care providers that have committed information blocking. This final rule exercises the Secretary’s authority under the 21st Century Cures Act (Cures Act) to establish “disincentives” for health care providers who engage in practices that the health care providers knew were unreasonable and were likely to interfere with, prevent, or materially discourage the access, exchange, or use of electronic health information (EHI), except as required by law or covered by a regulatory exception.

Healthcare providers that prevent authorized users from accessing electronic health records data face new consequences under a final rule the Health and Human Services Department published Monday. The regulation to discourage so-called information blocking emerged from the 21st Century Cures Act of 2016 and applies to providers including hospitals, physicians and accountable care organizations. Providers that HHS determines knowingly prevented others from appropriate use of EHR data would be subject to Medicare reimbursement cuts under the rule, which HHS, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology proposed in October.

The Health Resources and Services Administration is beginning to use HL7's Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources-based application programming interfaces to streamline reporting processes and enhance data quality. Since April 2024, HRSA has received Uniform Data System reports with de-identified patient-level submissions from health centers representing 2.2 million patients in proof-of-concept FHIR exchange testing, HRSA and the Office of the National Coordinator for Healthcare Technology said in a joint announcement on the ONC blog.