Touted as the product of 10 years of work, the most recent proposed rule issued July 10 by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT will usher in an age of automation for healthcare interoperability through application programming interface-based exchange capabilities, officials said on Wednesday.
The second version of ONC's Health Data, Technology, and Interoperability: Patient Engagement, Information Sharing and Public Health Interoperability rule, or HTI-2, is designed to support the data exchange needs of patients, providers, payers and public health agencies. The new proposed rule establishes the first health IT certification criteria for public health and payers under the ONC Health IT Certification Program. It also advances cybersecurity standards for multifactor authentication in certified health IT and creates an information blocking exception for certain reproductive health data, among other features. HTI-2 is something the "market can pick up and run with," said Micky Tripathi, the national coordinator, said during a media briefing Wednesday.