Lexology March 12, 2020
On March 9, 2020, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (“ONC”) each released final rules generally intended to ease both access to and ability to share patient health data and related information. CMS Administrator, Seema Verma, stated after last year’s release of the proposed rules that “The government spent more than $36 billion to encourage the adoption of electronic health records, but failed to make sure that the systems could actually talk to each other.”[1] The final rules, the CMS “Interoperability and Patient Access final rule” and the ONC “Cures Act final rule,” together have the potential to promote interoperability of technologies that collect and store patient...