Cures Act

[jordansparks]

The 21st Century Cures Act was passed in 2016, and the ONC has just released the final rules. It's a beast. Just the small section on EHR Interoperability and Information Blocking is 320 pages of 3 column small font text. The gist is that they are going to force medical software to allow patients to be able to easily get a digital copy of their records. This data can be read-only and they are not forcing software companies to allow write operations. Dental is different in many ways than medical, and I'm curious to see how this will play out. They also talk about offices who want to switch software. Right now, it's common for companies to block that data and make switching a miserable experience. The government will be forcing some changes, and those changes will spill over into dental software. The government actually envisions these changes as facilitating an entirely new slew of apps that function as online portals for medical information. The idea is that the patient will give permission to a trusted app, and then the app will go get the data from various monolithic medical software products using APIs that those software companies will be required to provide and maintain to certain standards.

[dqadri]

I know several physicians who were surprised that they had to pay fees to move data in and out of their EMR software. I know there has been a lot of work done with working groups within the ADA to create a standard data set and format for transferring data. I believe it is in XML with a particular namespace. It shouldn't be too hard to implement within Open Dental for data stored within the database I imagine.