Last week, NASL participated in the ONC’s 2^nd Interoperability Forum both online and at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC. NASL’s IT Committee will be briefed on the Forum during its regularly scheduled meeting on August 16, but here are a few take-aways from the Forum.

The conference kicked off with keynote addresses by National Coordinator for Health IT Don Rucker, MD and CMS Administrator Seema Verma. Dr. Rucker focused on themes familiar to NASL members, including ONC’s ongoing efforts to define what constitutes information blocking as is required under the 21^st Century Cures Act. Administrator Verma’s remarks struck a new chord as she called for providers to be “fax-free” by 2020. We also heard updates on ONC’s technical activities from Executive Director of ONC’s Office of Technology Steve Posnack and a Cures Act “101” from Executive Director of ONC’s Office of Policy Elise Anthony.

Attendees spent Day 2 of the conference in any one of 7 track sessions on 1) Security, 2) Clinician Experience with Interoperability; 3) Using Standards to Advance Research, 4) Interoperability Measurement, 5) Patient Matching, 6) Content Interoperability and 7) Interoperability Infrastructure.

Day 3 began with panel presentations recapping each of the 7 track sessions. Along the way, attendees and online participants were treated to myriad demonstrations covering such topics as care coordination using 360X and reducing provider burden using population-level data transfer. After covering the “Interoperability Measurement and Infrastructure” tracks early in the day, the audience was ready to hear from clinical and health informatics lead at Apple, Ricky Bloomfield, MD. His demo walked the audience through the iPhone Health Records app, which Dr. Bloomfield noted was built using the Argonaut FHIR API standard. For more information, join the NASL IT Committee discussion on August 16. To learn more, contact NASL here.