Healtheway, the non-profit, public-private collaborative that supports the eHealth Exchange, has announced that two product vendors have become the first to successfully complete eHealth Exchange product testing.
Medicity, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, was the first vendor to successfully complete the testing program, and in June, Medicity Network v7 was the first product to be deemed eHealth Exchange validated. The second vendor validation also occurred in June with the Nashville, Tenn.-based Informatics Corporation of America's (ICA) successful completion of product testing for its CareAlign 3.0 product.
The eHealth Exchange product testing program, launched earlier this year, was developed in collaboration with AEGIS— a Merrifield, Va.-based provider of IT consulting services to federal civilian, defense and commercial sector clients—to test conformance to the eHealth Exchange specifications and underlying health information exchange (HIE) standards that are required to onboard to the eHealth Exchange network.
This testing program uses the Developers Integration Lab (DIL) to enable vendors to test their products and reduce the risk of interoperability issues being introduced into production. Proper testing reduces the cost and burden of fixing interoperability issues and deploying patches. It also significantly reduces the level of effort and cost to organizations that onboard to the eHealth Exchange utilizing an eHealth Exchange validated product, according to Healtheway officials.
"Healtheway has made significant strides in simplifying testing and onboarding for the eHealth Exchange,” Mariann Yeager, Healtheway's executive director, said in a statement. “To further optimize testing, while continuing to raise the bar for interoperability, we recognized the need to verify that products can interoperate. Using eHealth Exchange validated products reduces testing in half, and further accelerates onboarding to the eHealth Exchange."
The new, automated testing process is expected to further increase the number of eHealth Exchange participants, which today stands at 62 organizations. These 62 participants represent approximately 1,000 hospitals, 6,000 medical groups and 60 million patients.
