ONC's Rucker: Interoperability puts American consumers in control of healthcare

Giving patients access to their health data on their smartphones will open up new business models of healthcare, the head of the Trump administration’s health IT policy arm said this week.

On March 9, the Department of Health and Human Services issued two rules, one each by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), that implement interoperability and patient access provisions of the bipartisan 21st Century Cures Act.

The ONC’s information blocking rule (PDF) requires that electronic health data be made available to patients at no cost and defines exceptions to data blocking.