HealthIT Answers February 7, 2022
By Wes Barker, Vaishali Patel, and Jeff Smith, ONC
Using APIs “without Special Effort”
The ONC’s Cures Act Final Rule (Cures Rule) supports patients’ and providers’ access to electronic health information (EHI) through Health Level Seven (HL7®) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) application programming interfaces (APIs). FHIR is ready for prime-time and the Cures Rule requires certain developers of certified health IT to provide a certified, FHIR API to their customer base by December 31, 2022.
To ensure these certified APIs can be accessed and used “without special effort”, the Cures Rule API Conditions and Maintenance of Certification contains a specific requirement that “service base URLs” – otherwise known as “endpoints” – must be published for all customers and in...