Information Blocking and the President’s FY23 Budget for ONC

While the federal government’s budget planning processes may have a certain mystique to them, some interesting tidbits are always in federal agency budgets if you know where to look. Fear not, because this blog post highlights a new legislative proposal associated with information blocking that’s been put forward by the Biden-Harris Administration for HHS. Specifically, the Administration has requested that Congress provide HHS with the authority to issue binding “advisory opinions” for the information blocking regulations as part of our implementation of the 21st Century Cures Act (Cures Act). If you gave it a quick skim or just looked at the bottom line for ONC’s requested funding level, you might have missed that the last page of the ONC portion of the Justification of Estimates of the FY23 President’s Budget included a request for new authority – to be able to issue binding advisory opinions for the information blocking regulations. The requested new authority would give HHS the ability to issue a binding advisory opinion to advise whether, in HHS’ view, a specific practice would constitute information blocking, including whether an exception would or would not be met given the facts and circumstances.