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Steven Posnack

Portrait of Steven Posnack

Steven Posnack serves as the Deputy National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

Prior to this role he served as executive director of the Office of Technology. In this role, Mr. Posnack advises the national coordinator, leads the ONC Health IT Certification Program, and directs ONC’s standards and technology investments through the ONC Tech Lab, which organizes its work into four focus areas: pilots, standards coordination, testing and utilities, and innovation. He led the creation of the Interoperability Standards Advisory, the redesign of ONC’s Certified Health IT Product List (CHPL), created the Interoperability Proving Ground, and developed the C-CDA Scorecard.

Prior to serving as the director of the Office of Standards and Technology, Mr. Posnack led ONC’s federal policy division within the Office of Policy and Planning from 2010 to 2014. In this capacity, he led ONC’s regulatory affairs, legislative analysis, and several federal policy development and coordination activities. From 2005 to 2010, he served as a senior policy analyst within ONC’s Office of Policy and Research. In that position, he co-authored the Nationwide Privacy and Security Framework for Electronic Exchange of Individually Identifiable Health Information. He also led a cross-HHS policy team that worked with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) as it developed its regulation for the electronic prescribing of controlled substances (EPCS).

Mr. Posnack earned a Bachelor’s degree in computer science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a Master’s degree in security informatics from Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute, and a Master’s degree in health policy from Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. He also maintains a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certificate.

Steven Posnack's Latest Blog Posts

The 2019 Interoperability Standards Advisory Reference Edition is Now Available

Steven Posnack | January 14, 2019

Get your 2019 off to a start with new and updated standards! Since the 2018 comment period on the Interoperability Standards Advisory (ISA) closed on October 1, we combed through all your comments and made improvements based on your suggestions.
If you’re new to the ISA, you will find it contains a variety of standards and implementation specifications curated by developers, standards gurus, and other stakeholders to meet interoperability needs (a term we use in the ISA to represent the purpose for use of standards or implementation specifications – similar to a use case) in healthcare.

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ONC is FHIR’d up: Unwrapping the new Inferno Testing Suite

Steven Posnack | October 2, 2018

In a blog post from earlier this week, we discussed the growing use of the Health Level 7 (HL7®) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) standard. FHIR is just one tool in the toolbox helping improve the interoperability of health information, a goal of the 21st Century Cures Act (Cures Act).
We are excited to see the growing use of this standard – and the expectation that the U.S. is poised to catch FHIR in 2019.

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Heat Wave: The U.S. is Poised to Catch FHIR in 2019

Steven Posnack | October 1, 2018

Recent blog posts from the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology  highlight the importance of application programming interfaces (APIs) and how they fit into the 21st Century Cures Act’s (Cures Act) implementation. Today, new analysis shows that the United States (US) might be at a turning point when it comes to the adoption and implementation of the Health Level Seven (HL7®) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) standard in health information technology (health IT). To understand how we got to this point,

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A New Home for the Electronic Prescribing Testing Tool

Steven Posnack | August 7, 2018

In 2017 we announced “A 5-Year Goal to Transition the ONC Health IT Certification Program’s Testing Portfolio” to include as many industry-developed and maintained testing tools as possible. This month, we reached another important milestone toward this goal: the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP) has formally taken over the stewardship of the electronic prescribing testing tool approved for use under the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) Health IT Certification Program (Certification Program).

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