Steven Posnack | December 16, 2025
In July our colleagues at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) launched an ambitious Health Technology Ecosystem pledge program. The groundswell of energy and enthusiasm for the program has been remarkable, and we’re glad to be their partner. CMS established several pledge categories associated with aspirational criteria included within its CMS Interoperability Framework. This post looks specifically at the similarities and differences between the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement™ (TEFCA™) and the “CMS-Aligned Network” pledge category.
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Steven Posnack | December 1, 2025
It wasn’t always so, but today we have technology available to exchange health information anywhere there’s an internet connection. What’s slowing us from doing so at nationwide scale is trust. The frictions are human and institutional. They cannot be addressed exclusively with technology.
Let’s look at the policy triangle that affects each network participant’s sharing posture. On the first side, there’s the HIPAA Privacy Rule that permits but does not require responses to network queries for treatment purposes.
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Catherine Strawley | August 7, 2025
What’s in a number? A lot, it turns out, especially when it comes to measuring interoperability progress. For well over a decade, we have collaborated with federal and private sector partners on interoperability-related surveys to answer a big picture question: “how are we doing?” Unlike other aspects of our lives where we can measure progress based on a single metric (like weight loss), measuring interoperability progress has become more challenging over time.
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Jordan Everson | July 15, 2025
In 2010, our office helped launch the Direct Project amidst the rollout of the ONC Health IT Certification Program and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Electronic Health Record Incentive Programs. The Direct Project created Direct Secure Messaging, a simple, secure, scalable, and standards-based method to send health information between partners and to provide a straightforward pathway to acquire unique provider and organizational addresses to engage in exchange that resembles secure email. Direct was first piloted in two projects: in Minnesota,
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Steven Posnack | July 7, 2025
As we roll into the second half of 2025, we wanted to state our TEFCA™ priorities and plans for the remainder of the year.
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