{"id":23508,"date":"2024-08-19T09:16:45","date_gmt":"2024-08-19T13:16:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/healthit-gov.go-vip.net\/buzz-blog\/?p=23508"},"modified":"2026-01-17T21:35:21","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T21:35:21","slug":"astp-partnership-with-hl7-advances-standards-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/healthit.gov\/blog\/health-it\/astp-partnership-with-hl7-advances-standards-development\/","title":{"rendered":"ASTP Partnership with HL7 Advances Standards Development"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Often functioning behind the scenes, standards play an enormous role in our daily lives. Nearly every aspect of our modern world is shaped by standards, including our homes (building codes, electrical outlets), cars (safety requirements, fuel efficiency), and the food we eat (nutrition labels). Standards in healthcare impact medical education, clinical practice, quality of care, and patient safety. Likewise, modern health information technology (IT) systems, like electronic health records (EHRs), rely on data standards to record and exchange health information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As the nation\u2019s health IT coordinator, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy and Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (hereafter referred to as ASTP) has a duty to ensure standards are in place that support federal policy goals and enable developers to create interoperable health IT products. Our commitment to the development and adoption of health care standards includes a series of cooperative agreements between ASTP and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hl7.org\/index.cfm\">Health Level Seven International<\/a>\u00ae (HL7\u00ae) that began in 2015. This collaboration has supported the development and growth of crucial health IT standards incorporated by ASTP regulations and the <a href=\"https:\/\/healthit.gov\/certification-health-it\/\">ONC Health IT Certification Program<\/a> (Certification Program), as well as tooling and resources for HL7\u2019s standards development community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>ASTP has long supported adoption and implementation of health IT standards through the Certification Program. Many of the technical capabilities described by the Certification Program are enabled by specific standards created by standards development organizations (SDOs) like HL7. For example, certified health IT must provide access to health information through an application programming interface (API) using the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources\u00ae (FHIR\u00ae) standard and HL7 FHIR US Core Implementation Guide (IG). The requirements for the Certification Program and associated standards are defined by ASTP <a href=\"https:\/\/healthit.gov\/legislation-regulation\/hti-rules\/hti-1-final-rule\/\">regulations<\/a>, including the 21st Century Cures Act Final Rule, HTI-1 Final Rule, and HTI-2 Proposed Rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Standards development can be a long and complex process, often involving multiple rounds of drafting, testing, and review before finalization\u2014all before they are included in ASTP regulations. SDOs help facilitate the process of creating standards by providing governance and infrastructure for communities of interested parties to collaborate and build consensus. However, SDOs often lack the resources to fully support standards development activities, especially when their standards are made freely available to the public. SDOs like HL7, for example, rely heavily on volunteers to do much of the heavy lifting to create and update standards like FHIR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Through the cooperative agreements, ASTP funds ongoing development of HL7 standards like Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (C-CDA) and the FHIR US Core IG (US Core). ASTP regulations use these standards to enable access to electronic health information via CEHRT. Both standards implement ASTP\u2019s United States Core Data for Interoperability (<a href=\"https:\/\/healthit.gov\/test-method\/united-states-core-data-for-interoperability-uscdi\/\">USCDI<\/a>) and describe the format and content of much of the health information exchanged between organizations today. ASTP\u2019s cooperative agreements with HL7 provide the necessary resources to ensure US Core and C-CDA are regularly updated to include the latest data classes and elements defined in USCDI. In 2023, HL7 published US Core version 6.1.0 and the C-CDA Companion Guide version 4.1, with content from USCDI version 3. These new versions were included in Certification Program criteria updates in the HTI-1 Final Rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even modest investments in standards can have a major impact on interoperability and the availability and accessibility of electronic health information. We applaud the work of SDOs like HL7 and look forward to continuing to collaborate with the standards development community to further advance interoperability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Often functioning behind the scenes, standards play an enormous role in our daily lives. Nearly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":619,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_selected_menu":"","_show_breadcrumbs":"true","_blog_show_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"archived-category":[],"featured":[],"topics":[420,422],"class_list":["post-23508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-it","topics-interoperability-standards","topics-standards-technology"],"acf":{"blog_authors":[{"blog_author_profiles":"198733"}],"hp_news_hide":false},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.3 (Yoast SEO v24.8.1) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>ASTP Partnership with HL7 Advances Standards Development - ONC Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Discover how ONC ensures health IT standards enable interoperability and support federal goals. Learn about standards like HL7 FHIR and C-CDA in our Certification Program.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/healthit.gov\/blog\/health-it\/astp-partnership-with-hl7-advances-standards-development\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"ASTP Partnership with HL7 Advances Standards Development\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Discover how ONC ensures health IT standards enable interoperability and support federal goals. 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