A number of healthcare associations are requesting more time from federal officials to review and submit comments to the government’s two recently proposed rules on interoperability and patient access.
Leading industry stakeholders groups, from the American Medical Association (AMA), the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), Premier, the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), and more than a dozen others, have written to both the ONC (the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT) and CMS (the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services), requesting “a 30-day extension of the deadline to submit comments on the proposed rules, as well as corresponding adjustments to the implementation timelines proposed in the rules.”
The two rules released in February—one from ONC and one from CMS—are separate, but at the same time very much aligned. Broadly, the two proposals—about 1,200 pages combined—look to further advance the nation’s healthcare interoperability progress. They represent great significance for health IT stakeholders, who will now be more under the microscope than ever before as it relates to their efforts in making sure that health information is seamlessly moving—while not restricting such efforts.
Certain elements of the regulations that will likely require close examination include strict provisions around information blocking, and what might qualify as an exception, as per ONC. CMS, meanwhile, is also requiring that federal health plans allow their patients to obtain their data through an API (application programming interface). Both rules also propose to require the use of the FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standard for APIs.
In the proposed regulations, CMS and ONC set a May 3 deadline for stakeholders to submit their comments. But now, various groups and organizations are asking for more time. Last month, the Electronic Health Record Association (EHRA) requested an extended review window, noting that additional time “would allow EHR developers to survey EHR Association members in order to provide ONC with actual development timelines for the measures being proposed. While some measures may be straightforward to achieve in a short timeline, others are likely to require more complex coding and implementation, thus calling into question the feasibility of the proposed 24-month development, testing and implementation timeline.”
In the more recent letter, the groups wrote that the proposed rules “are comprehensive, detailed and intertwined. They contain provisions with far-reaching implications for virtually all stakeholders in our healthcare system.”
They added, “An extension of the comment period will provide more adequate time to allow thoughtful analysis of the proposed rules and their impacts and to fully address the proposed rules’ multiple requests for comments and information embedded within the documents.”
