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.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology released a sweeping proposed rule Tuesday that includes plans to improve data sharing with public health authorities — a major challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic. The proposal, called the Health Data, Technology, and Interoperability: Patient Engagement, Information Sharing, and Public Health Interoperability rule, or HTI-2, builds on the agency’s long-term work to improve interoperability and information sharing between providers, payers and the public health ecosystem, said ONC head Micky Tripathi during a press conference Wednesday. The rule comes months after the agency finalized the HTI-1 rule, another extensive regulation aimed at boosting interoperability. The latest proposal includes first-of-their-kind criteria for software used by public health agencies and payers to be certified by the ONC. The ONC Health IT Certification Program is a voluntary program that outlines standards and functionality for health IT. “It doesn’t make sense for us to have silos separating public health information from provider and clinical information from payer information. We need more of a holistic perspective,” Tripathi said.

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.”

ONC's HTI-2 proposed rule implements provisions of the 21st Century Cures Act and reflects ONC’s focused efforts to advance interoperability and improve information sharing among patients, providers, payers, and public health authorities.

From her initial dreams of becoming a pharmacologist to her current role as an advisor for national health IT efforts, Tricia Lee Rolle has always been interested in research and getting stuff done. As Rolle says, “What is really fulfilling about being in government is that you realize what you're doing is affecting not just one or a few or a handful of patient lives, but we're really doing it in mass and at scale.” In the third episode of the season, we talk with Tricia Lee Rolle about the transformation of healthcare through the lens of medication management and the evolving role of the clinical pharmacist. How can we effect change in healthcare? How can we empower care providers with the tools they need to improve patient care? Rolle shares her experiences at the highest levels of industry and government.