By Wes Barker, ONC
X: @ONC_HealthIT
New data for clinicians reporting for Promoting Interoperability in 2019, 2020, and 2021 and their use of certified health IT are now available on healthit.gov/data. These represent an update to the data published through 2016 and representative of eligible professionals who participated in “Meaningful Use.” The data can be linked to the ONC Certified Health IT Product List (CHPL) and other HHS and industry health care datasets.
This data release is a long time coming. We and our CMS partners heard about your interest and demand for this data and now it’s fully available. Because the data contain helpful linking variables (like NPIs and CHPL IDs), it can help inform many research and other data uses cases.
ONC, for example, has used this data to inform implementation of the Health Level Seven International (HL7®) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources® (FHIR®) standard by merging it with API documentation data to assess FHIR adoption among developers of certified API technology in advance of ONC’s 21st Century Cures Act rulemaking.
You, too, can leverage this data for healthcare and health IT analysis and research.
Data Details
The “Certified Health Information Technology Reported by Clinicians for Promoting Interoperability Performance” datasets combine CMS Quality Payment Program (QPP) participation data with CHPL data. The QPP Experience datasets provide the certified EHR technology (CEHRT) reported by all clinicians who reported for the Promoting Interoperability performance category, beginning in program year 2019. This data field can be merged with the CHPL data to provide specific certified product details.
These datasets provide a minimum set of data fields to further combine these data with the full QPP experience data, full CHPL dataset, and other datasets. The documentation and notes you find on the documentation page describe those data fields necessary for linking to other data. See the Methods and Notes for further details on dataset construction and data linkages.
ONC plans to release more years of data in the future as well as a companion hospital dataset. Stay tuned to the ONC weekly e-blast and the Buzz Blog for future updates.
This article was originally published on the Health IT Buzz and is syndicated here with permission.