Healtheway www.healthewayinc.org at HIMSS15 announced the initial rollout of the Carequality www.carequality.org framework for inter-network health information exchange. Eleven organizations representing different types of data sharing networks are part of the initial launch phase.
State and regional HIE networks, vendor-based networks, and large Integrated Delivery Networks (IDN) are all participating. The participating data sharing networks will connect over 2,000 hospitals and an estimated 40,000 clinics across all 50 states with physician users numbering around 200,000.
“Carequality presents a great opportunity to significantly expand our network’s reach and provide increased value to our members and their patients,” said Laura McCrary, Ed.D, and Executive Director of the Kansas Health Information Network.
Through Carequality, all types of networks will be able to come together with a common trust agreement and established technical standards. This will significantly reduce the time, cost, and complexity currently associated with network-to-network connections.
Carequality is the only healthcare collaborative effort across industry and government that is implementing a framework to connect networks, according to Healtheway CEO Mariann Yeager. “A single network can’t address all stakeholder needs across all scenarios.”
She adds, “The eHealth Exchange, state and regional networks, and vendor-led networks such as CommonWell and Surescripts will all play a role and will need to connect with each other. In the cell phone industry, you can see multiple networks with the ability to make calls across carriers. Healthcare will need the same structure to enable a learning health system.”
The first phase of the rollout includes:
- Coordinated Care Oklahoma
- eClinicalWorks eEHX
- Epic Care Everywhere
- Greenway
- HIE Texas
- Intermountain Healthcare
- Kaiser Permanente
- Kansas Health Information Network
- Netsmart CareConnect
- Surescripts
- Utah Health Information Network
These pioneering networks are on the leading edge of the Carequality community that has come together to develop and implement the framework that represents over 70 organizations across healthcare.
These organizations include government agencies, standards development organizations, mental and behavioral health providers, health IT vendors, pharmacies, and others representing the voice for payers, consumers, long term, post-acute care, along with home care and hospice.
“This agreement will be a game changer for patients and physicians who care for them,” says Steven Lane, MD from Sutter Health in Northern California. “Each month we make over 3.5 million queries for records at outside organizations using Epic’s Care Everywhere Network and exchange over 700,000 patients’ records. With the Carequality framework in place, our search reach will expand exponentially across all kinds of different networks.”