Opportunity for Convergence in Clinical, Financial and Administrative through APIs

CMS and ONC have released two separate proposed rules giving Americans the right to have their electronic medical data on their smart phones as part of the 21st Century Cures Law allowing Americans more personal control over their healthcare.

February 14th Session 267 – 21st Century Cures Act: APIS Without Special Effort
Steve Posnack, Executive Director, ONC Office of Technology
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) Office of Standards and Technology hosted an education session that covered the breath of its work. The session included updates regarding ONC Health IT Certification Program operations, health IT testing resources, ongoing pilot activities, standards coordination, and ONC’s innovation-oriented projects.

Slides from the presentation – API Conditions of Certification (and more!)

Securing API Access 101 – Key points

  1. Today, health information is made accessible to web applications over the internet via web servers.
  2. What “tethered-portals” and 3rd party apps do programmatically to securely connect to HTTPS-based web servers is very similar.
  3. The same information security steps used by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Covered Entities for tethered-portals can be/are being used for 3rd party apps.