Carequality, an initiative of The Sequoia Project, today announced initial implementers of the Carequality Interoperability Framework released in December 2015. The companies are athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, Epic, NextGen Healthcare, and Surescripts.
The five organizations have agreed to provide health information exchange services for their customers under the comprehensive Framework, which consists of legal terms, policy requirements, technical specifications, and governance processes. The Framework is an operationalization of the groundbreaking Principles of Trust to enable nationwide health information exchange.
“The adoption of the Carequality Framework represents a major leap forward for nationwide interoperability,” explains Dave Cassel, Director, 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 initial implementers of the Carequality Interoperability Framework – and their clients – will benefit from accelerated, less costly health data sharing agreements, because they no longer need to develop one-off legal agreements between individual data sharing partners. These health information exchange partnerships are able to leverage existing networks and business relationships to rapidly expand. For example, most physicians already have access to a small network through a technology vendor or a health information exchange (HIE). These existing health data sharing opportunities will dramatically expand to include additional providers, payers, government agencies, and others as the Carequality community grows.
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.
