Healtheway, a nonprofit collaborative focused on advancing interoperability, has hired Dave Cassel, a former Epic Systems Corp. executive, to lead its Carequality initiative, which seeks to build a bridge between health networks. Carequality will initially focus on expanding how existing networks are able to request and receive health information from each other.
Cassel spent the last nine years of his career at Epic focused primarily on interoperability issues. He was one of the original designers of Epic’s Care Everywhere network. He was hired as Carequality is transitioning from planning to implementation, said Mariann Yeager, Healtheway CEO.
"We wanted a dedicated leader for Carequality — ideally someone with extensive experience tackling and overcoming HIE interoperability issues in real world scenarios,” Yeager said in a prepared statement. “Having worked with Dave as a partner in Carequality and witnessing his expertise and enthusiasm, he is the perfect person to lead this effort."
Carequality (pronounced care equality) has set up a Trust Framework Work Group to create a set of policy principles to establish trust between networks in order to enable the electronic exchange of health information. A Query Work Group will develop a requirements artifact that outlines business, technical, testing and policy requirements to enable simple query of documents between and among networks.
Carequality is not the only industry group working on interoperability. Commonwell Health Alliance is an association of EHR vendors working to create universal access to health data. By using its services, providers can see a patient’s health data using one interface rather than multiple point-to-point interfaces.
