By John Travis and members of the EHRA Information Blocking Task Force 

In our last blog on the United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI), the focus was on USCDI as the policy ground for advancing federal interests for promoting high impact needs for health data, and USCDI’s import as a certification specification impacting developers of Certified Health Information Technology (CHIT). In this blog, we focus on how the evolution and curation of USCDI impacts the efforts of health IT developers and implementers to “stay current.” 

By John Travis and members of the EHRA Information Blocking Task Force

With publication of the 21^st Century Cures Act: Interoperability, Information Blocking , and ONC’s Certified Health IT program final rule (Cures Act Final Rule), the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) worked to implement important provisions of the 21^st Century Cures Act (Cures Act) for nationwide interoperability. The initial proposal from ONC addressing the Trusted Exchange Framework and Cooperative Agreement (TEFCA), which was also required by the Cures Act, created a central role for the U.S. Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) in federal health IT policy, and it is important to consider what that role will be in the national policy framework. Will the USCDI push the industry beyond where it would go on its own by being progressive in its version expansion? Will it affirm and codify an extension of the current state, adhering to a principle of expansion based on supporting pre-requisites of already established interoperability standards? Or something in between?

In recent deliberations of the USCDI Task Force of the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC), the Federal Advisory Committee established under the Cures Act, this tension point has come to light. The members of the task force seem to have two perspectives on the matter.