HITEQ Resources & Events

In March 2019, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) issued a Proposed Rule, 21st Century Cures Act: Interoperability, Information Blocking, and the ONC Health IT Certification Program. ONC released a final rule in March 2020, published in the Federal Register on May 1, 2020. The Final Rule on Information Blocking prohibits actors from blocking the exchange of electronic health information and seeks to increase the ease and choices available for patients to access their data. 

While there are thousands of consumer health applications (health apps), which run on smartphones, watches, tablets, and other mobile devices, there is currently no central government agency that provides certification or guidance on consumer-based health apps. View this HITEQ Highlights webinar to learn more about a new tool, the Health App Analyzer, designed to assist health care providers, patients, and consumers in determining whether a given consumer health app provides appropriate health information, guidance, and related services. The Health App Analyzer is a step-by-step decision tree that determines whether a particular health app is the best fit for a specific patient or a health center's patient population.

Last fall, the HITEQ Center published an inventory describing many software tools that facilitate electronic patient engagement (EPE). The inventory detailed feedback from health center users of the EPE tools as well as information from the vendor about features and integration. As the health center workload has expanded to accommodate COVID-19 vaccination, the opportunity of EPE tools to address the needs of both health center and patients in this moment became apparent. HITEQ contacted the vendors included in the original inventory to gather supplemental information on how their products can be leveraged to support COVID-19 vaccine communication and distribution. Four EPE vendors responded, and those responses are outlined herein.

With the rapid shift to telehealth services propelled by the COVID-19 pandemic, many community health centers had to rapidly transition to a mechanism of care delivery previously unknown and unfamiliar. Within a matter of days and weeks, health centers creatively found ways to transform workflows and approaches to care delivery to continue to provide care even if the patient was physically distant. This resource highlights promising practices in virtual integrated behavioral health care identified from community health centers. 

An instructional video for accessing the UDS Clinical Dashboard.