Becker's Hospital Review

51 CIO / HEALTH IT HHS delays enforcement of interoperability rules: 6 things to know By Jackie Drees I n response to the COVID-19 pandemic, HHS on April 21 implemented enforcement discretion of its final interoperability rules. e regulations, finalized March 9, were is- sued by CMS and ONC to give patients se- cure and free access to their health data via third-party apps. CMS will give hospitals an additional six months to meet new requirements under its interoperability and patient access final rule, while ONC will exercise enforcement discre- tion for three months at the end of certain ONC Health IT certification program com- pliance dates for its final rule. Six things to know: 1. CMS' March 9 version of the rule stated that conditions of participation would be effective six months aer the final rule is published in the Federal Register, which is now extended to one year aer the final rule is published. 2. CMS will exercise enforcement discretion of its Patient Access API and Provider Direc- tory API policies for Medicare Advantage, Medicaid and the Children's Health Insur- ance Program for six months. To provide more flexibility to payers, CMS will not en- force new requirements until July 21, 2021. 3. CMS will not begin enforcing new require- ments under the Patient Access API for Qual- ified Health Plan issuers on the individual market Federally-Facilitated Exchanges until July 21, 2021. 4. Other policies in CMS' final rule will be implemented and enforced on schedule. 5. ONC will exercise discretion in enforc- ing all new requirements under the final rule that have compliance dates and time frames until three months after each initial compliance date or timeline identified in the final rule. 6. ONC's enforcement discretion will push back the timelines of its information blocking certification, application programming inter- faces and interoperability requirements. e agency's final rule was published May 1 in the Federal Register. n New York to use single digital system to manage 200 hospitals By Jackie Drees N ew York state will merge its 200 hospitals into a single digital system to disperse staff, patients and equipment to hospitals most in need during the COVID-19 pandemic, Vox reported. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced at the end of March that he met with the state's hospital leaders and devised a plan to merge the organizations into a single operating system. Hospitals across the state will share staff, patients and supplies, such as personal protective equipment, for the "foreseeable future," according to the April 3 report. The state's health department will use the digital system to oversee the movement of staff and medical resources. It will also set thresholds for the number of occupied ICU beds or ICU COVID-19 cases that would enact resource transfers. The state department will also manage the dis- tribution of PPE for healthcare workers. By merging all of its hospital systems into one, New York aims to share equipment and resources in a rational way. The state's 200 hospitals comprise 53,000 hospital beds, 20,000 of which are in New York City, according to the report. "We're in an almost apocalyptic crisis, which requires cutting through the bullshit," said Peter Viccellio, MD, assistant CMO at New York City- based Stony Brook University emergency department, according to the report. "If hospital A has resources and hospital B doesn't, it's in the best interest of the patient that hospital A and B work together. Protec- tive equipment should be available to all healthcare providers, not just those who work at a place with a better procurement officer." n Amazon opens COVID-19 'data lake' to hospitals By Mackenzie Garrity A mazon Web Services made its COVID-19 data lake available to the public April 8 to support hospitals, re- searchers and public health officials. The AWS COVID-19 data lake is "a central- ized repository of up-to-date and curated datasets on or related to the spread and characteristics of the novel coronavirus and its associated illness, COVID-19," according to the AWS data team. AWS has COVID-19 tracking data from Johns Hopkins and The New York Times in the data lake, along with hospital bed availability from health data company Definitive Healthcare and more than 45,000 research articles on COVID-19 from the Allen Institute for AI. Researchers can use the data lake to run analyses, and health officials can devel- op dashboards to track infections and resource deployment. n

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