1upHealth, a startup that builds clinical and claims data for easier sharing, said on Wednesday that it is adding Dr. Don Rucker to its leadership team as its chief strategy officer.

Rucker is a health information technology veteran. He recently led the Office of the National Health Information Technology Coordinator of the Department of Health and Human Services under the leadership of the Trump administration. He will help 1upHealth take the lead in developing new initiatives to help start-up companies’ customers aggregate and Use health data.

1upHealth sells a cloud-based platform that can build clinical and claims data to make it easier for healthcare providers, payers, and application developers to share information with each other. The platform converts data into a rapid healthcare interoperability resource format, which is a popular data sharing standard specified in the supporting rules issued by ONC and the Medical Insurance and Medicaid Service Center last year.

FHIR contains a data format and an application programming interface-a software interface that allows different applications to communicate with each other and share health data.

As part of it Rules from CMS, Payers regulated by the agency must implement FHIR-based APIs for patient access and provider directories starting in April.Companion Rules from ONC, If electronic health record developers want to obtain the stamp of approval for the ONC Health IT certification program, they must provide customers with FHIR-based APIs before December 2022.

The rules of ONC and CMS are the terms of the 21st Century Cure Act, which was signed into law by former President Barack Obama in 2016.

At ONC, Rucker, who was appointed by President Donald Trump as the head of the agency in 2017, led the development of ONC data sharing rules. The draft rule was released in 2019, and the final version was released last year.

According to a set of regulations Effective April, Providers must not prevent patients and other providers from accessing health data. These regulations do not require data to be exchanged in a specific way, but Rucker said that once a software developer provides these features, he expects providers to use FHIR-based APIs.

Rucker during ONC Strong support for increasing the use of FHIR-based APIs, which one He said it would stimulate the “app economy” Digital tools that can solve many healthcare problems-from new mobile apps Let patients download their medical records Go to an app on their smartphone to help providers report quality measures.

Last year, approximately 39% of patients who used the patient portal had used a mobile app to access their health records at least once. According to the data summary released by ONC, Which may include applications developed by EHR or patient portal providers. Only 5% of patients who use patient portals transmit their health data electronically to a separate third-party service or application, slightly up from 3% three years ago.

1upHealth’s platform is a step towards Rucker’s vision to structure data in a way that complies with regulations.

“The future of healthcare depends on wider access to standardized, standardized, and highly calculable data to improve quality and ultimately change the industry,” Rucker said at a news conference on Wednesday. He said that sharing data between providers, payers, and the “rapidly expanding medical application economy” will lead to better patient care.

In addition to building data, 1upHealth has also been working on adding new services to make health data more useful-publishing tools for searching data and analyzing population health plan data.

According to the data of Modern Healthcare, 1upHealth, established in 2017, has raised nearly 37 million U.S. dollars in venture capital funds. Digital Health Business and Technology. This includes a US$25 million in Series B financing Improve this year. This startup is part of the Health Information Exchange Department, which has raised a total of US$654 million in venture capital funding in the first nine months of 2021.