A New Pothole on the Health Interoperability Superhighway

On July 24, the new administration kicked off their version of interoperability work with a public meeting of the incumbent trust brokers. They invited the usual suspects Carequality, CARIN Alliance, CommonWell, Digital Bridge, DirectTrust, eHealth Exchange, NATE, and SHIEC with the goal of driving for an understanding of how these groups will work with each other to solve information blocking and longitudinal health records as mandated by the 21st Century Cures Act.

Of the 8 would-be trust brokers, some go back to 2008 but only one is contemporary to the 21stCC act: The CARIN Alliance. The growing list of trust brokers over our decade of digital health tracks with the growing frustration of physicians, patients, and Congress over information blocking, but is there causation beyond just correlation?
A recent talk by ONC’s Don Rucker reports:

One way to get data to move is open APIs, which the 21st Century Cures Act mandates by tasking EHR vendors to open up patient data “without special effort, through the use of application programming interfaces. Rucker emphasized the distinction—without quite naming what it is—between open APIs for vendors and open APIs for providers. “We’re hard at work at defining those,” he said. One difference is how the APIs are implemented: Vendors must allow for the APIs technologically, in their products, and providers must actually take advantage of the APIs...