News Feature | March 17, 2017

National Record Locator Service Adds Vendors To Expand Nationwide Interoperability

Christine Kern

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Can Electronic Health Records Bring Down Drug Prices?

NRLS now allows providers to locate and share records for 230 million patients in real time.

Surescripts has announced its National Record Locator Service (NRLS) is now live at 14 major health systems nationwide, allowing providers to locate and share records for 230 million patients in real time and boosting interoperability. The NRLS system enables providers to see where patients have previously received care and retrieves medical records regardless of geography.

This latest expansion comes on the heels of recent deployments of Surescripts NRLS across eight large health systems. NRLS now reaches patients in all 50 states and is live in 10 major metropolitan areas, including Charlotte, NC, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, and Portland, OR.

“As consumers of healthcare, patients are demanding a more connected healthcare experience,” says Tom Skelton, Chief Executive Officer of Surescripts. “Our goal is to accelerate provider adoption of critical data-sharing technologies to increase patient safety, lower costs, and ensure quality care. With Surescripts National Record Locator Service, these healthcare organizations have access to actionable patient intelligence, and can make faster and better decisions to ultimately improve patient care.”

Specifically, NRLS provides access to:

  • almost 230 million patients, or approximately 70 percent of the U.S. population
  • more than 4 billion patient/provider interactions
  • patients in all 50 states

The most recent additions to the NRLO network include Aprima, eClinicalWorks (eCW), and NextGen Healthcare. Surescripts will offer EHRs free access to NRLS until 2019.

“With Surescripts’ National Record Locator Service, we are empowering clinicians to provide the highest quality care possible,” said Girish Navani, CEO and cofounder of eClinicalWorks. “Our customers now have the ability to seamlessly exchange health information and provide access to critical patient data whenever and wherever they need it.”

“We are excited to be able to provide meaningful interoperability that ensures our clients can put timely, relevant, and correct patient health information in front of the right care team,” says Rusty Frantz, president and CEO of NextGen Healthcare. “This partnership is a great example of NextGen’s drive to enable our industry to achieve both great patient outcomes and financial success in the emerging world of value-based healthcare.”

NRLS operates within the nationwide Carequality Interoperability Framework that leverages a common set of legal, technical, and policy rules for data sharing across technology platforms and networks. Aprima joins NRLS as a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) partner, expanding the interfaces available for NRLS and ultimately increasing the breadth of the Surescripts network.

“As a FHIR partner for Surescripts National Record Locator Service, we are supporting the increasing interoperability needs of our customers,” said Michael Nissenbaum, president and CEO of Aprima Medical Software. “We will be able to provide our customers with unparalleled connectivity that bridges between FHIR and Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) protocols, giving them the ability to share even more critical patient data nationwide.”