Since 2021, the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy and Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (hereafter ASTP) and the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) have collaborated to develop and field survey questions designed to better understand family physicians’ experience using health information technology (health IT) in primary care. We’ve now fielded questions for three years (2022-2024) through multiple questionnaires, and the results have driven data briefs and studies.

In Summer 2022, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a plan for a department-wide management policy to advance interoperability through departmental activities. Secretary Xavier Becerra called on the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), working in collaboration with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Financial Resources (ASFR), to establish and oversee a consistent HHS-wide approach to ensure that health IT requirements in grants, cooperative agreements, contracts, and policy and regulatory actions align with HHS-adopted data standards. This approach is formally known as the HHS Health IT Alignment Policy.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is restructuring its technological and AI responsibilities, transferring these from the Assistant Secretary for Administration to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), now also designated as the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy. FedScoop’s Madison Alder sits down with Micky Tripathi, head of ONC and the new Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy, to discuss the reorganization’s goals to enhance departmental AI and tech strategies and improve integration across HHS’s diverse agencies.

HHS has proposed a rule aimed at improving patients’ access to medical images and curbing the use of physical media in radiology. X-rays, CT scans and MRIs are often stored in platforms external to electronic health records, such as picture archiving and communication systems. But this has made the electronic exchange of images more difficult, forcing patients to obtain their results via flash drives or CDs. HHS, however, is proposing to update regulations related to certification of EHR systems and info blocking, the American College of Radiology reported Thursday. Its goal is to start having certified EHRs include links to medical images beginning Jan. 1, 2028. “We believe the prevalence of CD-ROMs and other physical media to share diagnostic quality images across healthcare settings indicates a lack of interoperability and access to imaging results that represents a continued burden for patients and clinicians,” the HHS Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy said in the rule, which is slated to be published in the Federal Register Aug. 5. “ASTP/ONC believes that promoting access to and the exchange of images via program requirements may encourage more widespread adoption and integration of these already existing pathways and reduce burdens caused by physical media exchange,” the agency added later.

TEFCA falls under the purview of an office in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Patients can think about TEFCA like they think about using their cellphone, said Micky Tripathi, assistant secretary for technology policy and national coordinator for health information technology at HHS. If one person uses Verizon as their phone carrier, a second person uses AT&T and a third person uses T-Mobile, they are all still able to call and text one another. The same playbook applies to TEFCA. “The idea was, ‘We really ought to just have that user experience that wherever I am, whichever system I’m using, I know that it’ll connect to every other network, whichever network I’m on,’” Tripathi told CNBC in an interview.