ehr onc final certification - Department of Health Care Services

already existing regulatory requirements. If we believe that the Secretary’s
adoption of a newer version of a standard on a voluntary basis would be
appropriate, we would then seek the advice of the HIT Standards Committee to
evaluate the newer version of the standard and to solicit relevant public input.
The Secretary would then recognize or adopt for voluntary use the new version of
the standard in a Federal Register publication. At that point, use of either the new
or old version would be considered compliant. Entities that would voluntarily
adopt the later backward compatible version of the standard would remain
obligated to accommodate the earlier adopted version without modification. Prior
to the Department formally retiring the older version of the standard and
mandating the use of the later version, the Department would engage in notice and
comment rulemaking.
2. Transport Standards
Comments. Generally, commenters echoed one of two responses: some urged for
the complete removal of SOAP and REST and others requested that we provide detailed
implementation specifications for SOAP and REST along with the identification of the
transactions to which SOAP and REST were applicable. Some commenters also stated
that neither standard was sufficiently specified in order to ensure interoperability, while
others pointed out that it appeared that we had globally applied the usage of SOAP or
REST to all adopted standards, which, if true, would cause conflicts with several adopted
standards (e.g., it was noted that the HL7 standards we adopted utilize Minimum Lower
Layer Protocol (MLLP) as the transport standard and not SOAP or REST).
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