Deven McGraw
Co-founder and chief regulatory officer
Ciitizen
Former deputy director for health information privacy at HHS’ Office for Civil Rights and acting chief privacy officer at ONC
“One of the challenges is the breadth of the definition. It is considered to be (information) blocking if it is an action or even a failure to act—an omission—that is likely to interfere with, prevent, or materially discourage access or exchange or use of electronic health information.
In an effort to ease these rules into effect, ONC has said that electronic health information is going to be limited to the information that’s in what’s called the U.S. Core Data for Interoperability v1—the USCDI—for the first 18 months of the information blocking rules. After those 18 months, essentially, anything that fits the definition of electronic health information, which ties very closely to the concept of a designated record set under HIPAA—the data that patients have the right to—is considered to be part of the EHI definition.”
Jeffrey W. Short
Attorney
Hall, Render, Killian, Heath, and Lyman
ONC laid out eight broad exceptions to its data blocking rule.
“One area I think is going to have to play out is the infeasibility exception. The infeasibility exception is where that all comes home. And in there, there’s the (return on investment) standard—what’s your return on investment of doing some of these activities, and how does that fit into the financial condition of the actor under the information blocking in that healthcare institution? If it’s a highly profitable, high-margin (facility), do they get a different standard than a critical-access hospital that’s struggling to even survive. And that’s going to be played out by the (Office of Inspector General).