Modern Healthcare October 26, 2019
If federal agencies have their way, there’s one new technology that health systems are going to be interacting with much more frequently: patient-facing apps.
Apps in many ways underpin the long-awaited companion interoperability proposals the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the CMS released early this year. The proposals would require healthcare providers and insurers to adopt standardized application programming interfaces, or APIs—protocols that connect IT systems like electronic health records with third-party apps.
In the wake of the ONC’s release of the proposal, industry stakeholders voiced concerns about whether they would be held accountable for how patients, or the apps they request to share their medical records with, use their data—leading HHS’ Office for Civil...