Carequality, a health data exchange initiative of The Sequoia Project, has reported that more than 1,250 hospitals, 35,000 clinics, and 600,000 healthcare providers are connected through its interoperability framework.
Nine pioneering Carequality members are live now, including athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, Epic, GE Healthcare, Netsmart, NextGen Healthcare, OneRecord, Santa Cruz HIE, and Surescripts. Exchange has rapidly increased over the first year and a half of operation, with over 2.4 million clinical documents now being exchanged monthly across these organizations and their customers, according to officials.
Carequality is a national-level, consensus-built, common interoperability framework to enable exchange between and among health data sharing networks. It brings together electronic health record (EHR) vendors, record locator service (RLS) providers and other types of existing networks from the private sector and government, to determine technical and policy agreements to enable data to flow between and among networks and platforms.
In addition to the regional health information exchange (HIE), record locator service, personal health and EHR vendors live now, 18 other organizations have signed on to be implementers of the Carequality framework. Those in the onboarding process now include new kinds of service providers, consumer apps, and additional EHR vendors and HIEs, officials say.
“What’s so exciting about the Carequality framework is its inclusiveness and flexibility,” Dave Cassel, vice president of Carequality, said in a statement. “In about a year and a half, we’ve gone from a good concept, to a critical mass of nationwide exchange among diverse organizations. The speed with which this has occurred isn’t something we’re accustomed to from interoperability projects, historically.”
In all, more than 50 percent of all healthcare providers in the country are now empowered to share health data under the Carequality Interoperability Framework. However, Carequality was designed to be largely invisible to physicians and other individual users. “Our goal is to make national-scale interoperability easily accessible for provider organizations and other stakeholders,” Cassel explained. “If we’ve done our job well, users won’t even know we exist; they’ll just see improved capabilities within their home systems or networks.”
