Carequality, an initiative of the Sequoia Project in December announced the initial implementers of the “Carequality Interoperability Framework”. The five health IT leaders include athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, Epic, NextGen Healthcare and Surescripts.
The five organizations are going to provide health information exchange services to their customers under the comprehensive Framework. The initial implementers of the Carequality Interoperability Framework and their clients will benefit from accelerated, less costly health data sharing agreements. This will result because they no longer will need to develop off legal agreements between individual data sharing partners.
These health information exchange partnerships are able to leverage existing networks and business relationships to rapidly expand. For example, most physicians already have access to a small network through a technology vendor or a HIE. These existing health data sharing opportunities will dramatically expand to include additional providers, payers, government agencies, and others as the Carequality community grows.
“The adoption of the Carequality Framework represents a major leap forward for nationwide interoperability”, explained Dave Cassel, Director of Carequality. “By these organizations committing to unified Rules of the Road, they are simplifying system-to-system connections to make data exchange easier for a significant portion of the healthcare ecosystem.