ONC Relaxes 2011 requirements on Guides for Public Health Reporting

It took them about 7 weeks to write and publish the 18 or so pages needed to fix the problem, but fix it they did, and in the right way given deadlines under Meaningful Use.  ONC has removed the use of the HL7 2.5.1 implementation guide specified for public health reporting in a recent interim final rule.  The rule is now "on display" and is expecte to be published in the Federal Register on or soon after Wednesday of this week.

You can view the rule (now published in the Federal Register) below:


I still owe you a review of the work being done by ISDS. That is, in my opinion, presently being implemented through an unbalanced process that is dominated by one side of the transaction (the one not having  "receiving" requirements under the Incentives rule).

Having said that, at least the current rule allows implementations to proceed using the 2011 criteria, and we can all breathe a bit easier right now. You will soon be able to just simply use the HITSP C39 Specification for public health reporting without hacking it to support 2.3.1 as I had previously suggested.

I'm not sure how much of that seven weeks delay could have been saved without eradicating the root cause of the mistake in the first place.  While we presently have Government 2.0 initiatives, I'm not sure that we are quite ready for "Agile Government" or the potential backlash it could cause.  But, maybe something could be done about more nimble communcations...