The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has extended until June 29 the deadline for stakeholders to submit comments on the creation of a governance structure for the Nationwide Health Information Network, Healthcare IT News reports (Miliard, Healthcare IT News, 6/5).
Background
NwHIN is a national health IT infrastructure that aims to help health care providers exchange data. It started as a conceptual framework, then evolved into a set of data exchange standards and later was leveraged for pilot testing.
In May, ONC issued a request for information on the creation of a governance structure for NwHIN. According to an ONC presentation, the NwHIN governance mechanism will include rules on technical, business practice, privacy and security requirements to establish a common trust framework for the exchange (iHealthBeat, 5/11).
New Deadline
In the initial RFI, ONC said that it would accept public comments through Regulations.gov until June 14 (Federal Register, 5/15).
However, ONC said it decided to delay the deadline until June 29 in response to stakeholders' requests for more time to submit input (Healthcare IT News, 6/5).