ONC and CMS push patient ownership of health data

One of the keys to increasing interoperability is giving patients control over their own data, regulators from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the CMS said at the 2018 Interoperability Forum this week.

To help facilitate that, CMS regulators might require providers to share data with patients in a universal electronic format. That move would help thwart so-called information-blockers—providers and vendors who prevent the sharing of patient data.

But news on information-blocking was slim at the forum, where some expected the ONC to announce a rule on the practice.

Instead, regulators and health IT leaders focused on achieving interoperability through FHIR standards, open application programming interfaces and letting patients be the agents of...