Earlier this month at the HIMSS annual conference in Las Vegas, Jared Kushner, White House advisor and director of the Office of American Innovation, and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Seema Verma, announced the Trump Administration’s new “MyHealthEData” interoperability initiative.
A coordinated effort led by the White House Office of American Innovation with participation from HHS, CMS, ONC, NIH, and the VA, the initiative is designed to achieve interoperability and “empower patients by giving every American control of their medical data.” As part of the initiative, CMS launched Medicare’s Blue Button 2.0 to provide Medicare beneficiaries access to their data; called on private insurance plans to follow CMS and provide patients their data; announced it was exploring ways to reform documentation guidelines for Evaluation & Management E&M codes; and announced an intention to “overhaul the Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Programs to save time and costs.”
According to CMS officials, an upcoming round of rulemaking will be aimed at implementing policy goals and changes to existing regulatory programs discussed at HIMSS18. Verma also endorsed the planned 2019 upgrade to 2015 Edition certified EHR systems, which she noted would “help ensure data sharing” through the use of application programming interfaces (APIs.) (See here and here for more details and here for CMS’s HIMSS18 presentations)