Like many things in the age of COVID-19, the vaccine development landscape is unlike anything we have seen in our lifetimes. There are over 100 SARS-CoV-2 vaccines currently in development, many of which are utilizing new technologies not used in any currently licensed vaccine. The potential impact on immunization schedules (clinical guidelines for clinicians) and immunization clinical decision support is significant.
On March 9, 2020 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released its final rule on the 21st Century Cures Act: Interoperability, Information Blocking, and the ONC Health IT Certification Program. Referred to by some people as the “Information Blocking Rule,” since this is the primary topic, the document actually covers a host of other issues related to interoperability driven primarily by requirements of the 21st Century Cures Act. In addition to the final rule itself you can read the ONC press release, a comparison between the proposed and final rules, and lots of other resources. The final rule is was officially be published in the Federal Register on May 1, 2020.
In February 2020 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released its final report on the Strategy on Reducing Regulatory and Administrative Burden Relating to the Use of Health IT and EHRs as mandated by the 21st Century Cures Act.
The report is divided into the same four major sections as the version released for comment back in 2018 (see our previous blog), each covering a different area: clinical documentation; health IT usability and the user experience; EHR reporting; and public health reporting. For each section, the report briefly lays out the issues and challenges and provides some key strategies and recommendations.
In February 2020 the eHealth Initiative (eHI) published a new report, The State of Patient Matching in America, based on a survey of over 115 health information exchange (HIE) and provider organizations conducted by NextGate on their behalf. Over the past few years we have written numerous related blogs on the ONC PMAL Project, the GAO Report on Patient Matching, and an Update on Patient Matching Activities in the US. Patient matching is one of the areas called out by Congress in the 21st Century Cures Act for review and consideration.
On February 12, 2020, HLN released a new version (v1.22.1) of the Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE). ICE is a state-of-the-art open-source software system that provides clinical decision support for immunizations for use in Immunization Information Systems (IIS), Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Personal Health Record (PHR) Systems.