Healtheway has formed Carequality (pronounced care-e-quality) a new initiative to accelerate progress in health data exchange among multi-platform networks, healthcare providers, EHR vendors, and HIE vendors. Healtheway has just presented a Call-for-Action for others to participate in Carequality.
Carequality is an open, transparent, and inclusive industry-driven effort. Stakeholders will convene to develop and maintain a standards-based interoperability framework to enable information exchange between and among networks.
As physicians and hospitals become more accountable for the care they provide, information needs to flow freely and securely as patients move between different care providers. While substantial progress has been made to advance this type of connectivity, existing initiatives and networks generally working independently of one another have resulted in silos of connectivity. Carequality brings together existing initiatives and networks to provide a standardized framework for working together.
Carequality’s goal is to find agreement on a common national-level set of requirements to enable providers to access patient data from other groups as easily and securely as today’s bank customers connect to disparate banks and user accounts on the ATM network. Once achieved health data interoperability will greatly improve and costs will be reduced.
According to Mariann Yeager, Healtheway’s Executive Director, “A group of organizations, approached Healtheway about serving as the neutral convener for industry stakeholders to work together. A community of healthcare providers, payers, consumer groups, IT companies and software vendors are signing up to join this effort. Carequality is open to all stakeholders who wish to participate.
Any organizations that joins Carequality by April 1, 2014 may be a founder in the initiative. To date, nearly two dozen organizations have pledged to join with many others representing large and small care provider groups, retail pharmacies, clinics, EHR innovators, and technology industry leaders are planning to support the effort.
For more information, go to www.healthewayinc.org.