Yesterday, Surescripts announced that they will implement the National Record Locator Service with leading electronic health vendors like Epic, eClinicalWorks, and Greenway Health. This implementation will allow nearly 500,000 providers the ability to locate and exchange patient health records from virtually any location across the country.
“Today marks a major milestone in our collective effort to connect the nation’s healthcare system and enable interoperability between disparate parts of our healthcare community,” said Tom Skelton, Chief Executive Officer, Surescripts. “By leveraging the assets and existing infrastructure we built for e-prescribing, we are able to quickly scale true interoperability on a national basis to save time and money, and ultimately improve the patient experience.”
The National Record Locator Service seamlessly integrates into existing EHR workflows. It leverages the Surescripts nationwide network of more than 200 million patients--enabling clinicians to quickly and easily obtain patient health history at the point of care. In addition, Surescripts is using the Carequality framework for inter-network health information exchange to guide the roll-out.
“Leveraging Surescripts’ National Record Locator Service, we can offer our customers an enormous leap in search and record location capabilities,” said Carl Dvorak, President, Epic. “We look forward to partnering with other payors, vendors and provider organizations to make it easier to find and aggregate patient medical records, regardless of where they have received care, all while ensuring the highest level of security, privacy and patient consent.”