Officials of Carequality—a national-level, consensus-built, common interoperability framework to enable exchange between and among health data sharing networks—said that more than 14 million clinical documents were exchanged on the framework during August.
According to Carequality officials, this brings the number of documents exchanged to over 59 million since Carequality started measuring in December 2016. Month-over-month growth for Carequality is accelerating as more physicians utilize the expanding connectivity.
More than 50 percent of all healthcare providers in the country can now share health data under the Carequality Interoperability Framework, noted officials. However, they also point out that Carequality was designed to be largely invisible to physicians and other individual users. To date, more than 1,400 hospitals, 40,000 clinics, and 600,000 healthcare providers are connected through the Carequality implementer community, they said.
“Hitting over 50 million documents exchanged is truly a milestone for Carequality,” said Dave Cassel, vice president of Carequality. “We’ve seen growth each month that Carequality has been in operation, but the rate of growth has been dramatic over the past few months. More than half of the documents exchanged in about two years of operations, have been in the past three months. It’s very exciting to see that providers are finding value in Carequality and are increasingly using the connections.”
In August, Carequality and CommonWell, an association providing a vendor-neutral platform and interoperability services for its members, announced they had started a limited roll-out of live bidirectional data sharing with an initial set of CommonWell members and providers and other Carequality Interoperability Framework adopters.
