As required by the 21st Century Cures Act, the Department of Health and Human Services recently released a draft of the Trusted Exchange Framework to facilitate secured interoperability among national healthcare partners.
This draft framework addresses a myriad of challenges and issues that have hampered sharing health information among qualified health information networks (HINs), their participating health information exchange partners and supporting provider organizations. This framework will be facilitated through the HHS Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) with a single Recognized Coordinating Entity (RCE) that will be selected by a competitive process.
The ONC will host a webinar Jan. 19 from 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. to review the framework and answer questions.
The RCE will use the policies, procedures, standards, principals and goals outlined in the framework to develop a single common agreement that all qualified HINs can voluntarily adopt to address the contractual issues to help overcome the legal obstacles that have hindered interoperability among qualified HINs and their exchange partners.
This proposed Trusted Exchange Framework supports the national ONC goals for interoperability that include patient access, population-level data exchange and the open/accessible application programming interfaces to encourage greater entrepreneurial effort in making health information more accessible and usable.
The 45-day comment period for the draft framework closes Feb. 20.
