ONC’s Cures Act Final Rule supports seamless and secure access, exchange, and use of electronic health information.
The rule is designed to give patients and their healthcare providers secure access to health information. It also aims to increase innovation and competition by fostering an ecosystem of new applications to provide patients with more choices in their healthcare.
It calls on the healthcare industry to adopt standardized application programming interfaces (APIs), which will help allow individuals to securely and easily access structured electronic health information using smartphone applications.
The rule includes a provision requiring that patients can electronically access all of their electronic health information (EHI), structured and/or unstructured, at no cost.
Finally, to further support access and exchange of EHI, the rule implements the information blocking provisions of the Cures Act. The rule outlines eight exceptions to the definition of information blocking.