Partner Reece Hirsch discussed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid’s (CMS’s) interoperability regulations that require patient access to health information, which began on July 1, with EHRIntelligence. The regulations come as part of the 21st Century Cures Act. Reece, who is working with health plans on compliance with the new patient access rule, noted that compliance will not happen overnight, even for the payer-facing rule. On the payer side, the CMS rules require payers to use application programming interfaces to provide members with certain health data. Additionally, the CMS interoperability rule requires payers to produce an API-supported provider directory. “It is a pretty big lift to implement this major new access requirement,” he said. “Not all plans were 100 percent ready on July 1,” he added. “There’s going to be some transition process and it remains to be seen how CMS responds to that.”