AHA comments on Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement

Commenting today on the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement Draft 2, the AHA said it is generally supportive of the overall concept of the agreement and agency’s goal to create a voluntary network-of-networks that would enable hospitals to join one network and access all of their trading partners.
 
“ONC’s responsiveness to comments on the agency’s first draft of the TEFCA, including the addition of this second round of comments and a ‘walk before we run’ approach, is beneficial to help ensure that this goal can be met in a manner that is workable and useful for all parties involved,” AHA wrote.
 
“More specifically, we support ONC’s removal of the population-level data requests until such time as the standards and deeper levels of trust exist, and the selection of a non-profit organization to serve as the Recognized Coordinating Entity. We also appreciate ONC’s clarification that HIPAA takes precedence over TEFCA. We are, however, concerned that ONC’s approach to the TEFCA has the potential to disrupt efforts already underway, which have grown since the first iteration of the TEFCA was released, and we are concerned that ONC may stifle progress. In addition, we are concerned with the removal of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource from the standards stack that Qualified Health Information Networks would be required to support.”