As the November 2nd deadline for compliance with ONC’s Information Blocking Rule nears, many health care providers – which are “Actors” subject to the Rule – are scrambling to reexamine their default settings for sharing various types of data, including lab results. In ONC’s Final Rule preamble, several commenters indicated that providers’ current organizational policies call for practices that delay the release of laboratory results so that the patient’s clinician has an opportunity to review the results before potentially needing to respond to patient questions, or has an opportunity to communicate the results to the patient in a way that builds the clinician-patient relationship.
