In December 2016, a bill called the 21st Century Cures Act was signed into law, with several important goals, including improved interoperability between health information systems, and increased patient access to their own health data. This law also empowered the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to create regulations to further this goal, which it did with the creation of the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access final rule (CMS-9115-F). In order to increase patients' access to their health data, the rule prohibits information blocking and requires health insurance plans to give members access and the ability to share their health plan data via an API endpoint with third-party applications of their choice. The mandate also requires health plans to provide 3rd party applications a way to access provider directory information via an API.