HIEs Respond to TEFCA

Last month, the Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative (SHIEC), of which CORHIO is a member, participated in a call for comments for part 2 of the Trusted Exchange Framework Common Agreement (TEFCA). SHIEC represents more than 70 health information exchanges across the nation, so they are an important voice to add to comments on the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s TEFCA Draft 2.

The highlights of SHIEC’s comments:

• Importance of engaging various stakeholders (including SHIEC and others) early in the process of developing requirements and standards to ensure decisions can be operationalized

• Impact of the proposed Information Blocking Rule as it relates to TEFCA, including whether entering into the Common Agreement (which expressly limits exchange purposes) may constitute information blocking

• Fundamental need for robust patient matching – that could be achieved through a centralized master patient index (MPI)

SHIEC supports various forms of querying for a patient (including broadcast and targeted queries), but strongly believes that ONC must set measurable, common matching standards (e.g. thresholds for accuracy) to ensure nationwide interoperability.

The full comments are located here: https://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/webform/tefca_comment_form/onc-tefca-2-combined-june-2019-final_2.pdf