5 Health IT Leaders Adopt Carequality Interoperability Framework
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, Epic, NextGen healthcare, Surescripts are all among the first to adopt the framework.
Carequality, an initiative of The Sequoia Project, has announced five major healthcare organizations have adopted the Carequality Interoperability Framework released in December 2015. The initial adopters include athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, Epic, NextGen Healthcare and Surescripts.
The non-profit Sequoia Project supports multiple, independent health IT interoperability initiatives, most notably: the eHealth Exchange, a rapidly growing community of exchange partners who share information under a common trust framework and a common set of rules; and Carequality, a public-private collaborative effort to build consensus among existing data sharing networks regarding technical specifications and best practices, much like the telecommunications industry did for linking cell phone networks.
As part of the adoption agreement, these five organizations have agreed to provide health information exchange services for their customers under the comprehensive Framework, which provides legal terms, policy requirements, technical specifications, and governance processes. The Framework is an effort to institute a nationwide health information exchange.
“The adoption of the Carequality Framework represents a major leap forward for nationwide interoperability,” explained Dave Cassel, director of Carequality. “By these organizations committing to unified Rules of the Road, they are simplifying system-to-system connections to make data exchange easier for a significant portion of the healthcare ecosystem.”
The Carequality Interoperability Framework provides accelerated, less costly health data sharing agreements to the implementers since they no longer need to develop one-off legal agreements between individual data sharing partners. The initial implementers will focus first on query-based exchange of clinical documents, but the Framework was developed to support an unlimited variety of use cases.
“The Carequality Framework is a testament to healthcare vendors’ commitment toward making seamless interoperability a reality for patients and providers,” says Dave Fuhrmann, Vice President of Interoperability for Epic. “Shared rules and guidelines are going to make it possible for all of us to dramatically increase the number of connections we have across systems to make care safer and more efficient.”
With the new emphasis on the transition to value-based care models, interoperability is becoming a crucial element in providing better healthcare. As Rusty Frantz, president and CEO of Quality Systems Inc., said, “Securely sharing health data across health networks creates the kind of informed and empowered care system required for a successful transition to value-based medicine. As industry leaders we’re making true progress in nationwide data exchange and look forward to using the Carequality framework to make the right information easily accessible, to the right care team, the right clinician, at the right time and place.”