Today more than 1,250 hospitals, 35,000 clinics, and 600,000 healthcare providers are connected through Carequality www.carequality.org, an initiative of The Sequoia Project. Carequality enables the exchange of data between and among health data sharing networks.
The Carequality Framework provides essential elements for trusted national exchange such as rules of the road, well-defined technical specifications, and a participant directory. Nine pioneering Carequality members live include athenahealth®,eClinicalWorks, Epic, GE Healthcare, Netsmart, NextGen Healthcare, OneRecord, Santa Cruz HIE, and Surescripts.
The exchange of documents has rapidly increased over the first year and a half of operation. Over 2.4 million clinical documents now being exchanged monthly across the organizations and their customers.
Organizations using this framework may expand connectivity of their existing network while providing their own clients new health data sharing options. Dave Cassel, Vice President of Carequality, credits the role of the participating networks in achieving wide roll-outs in a relatively short time. “We could never have seen the scope of rollout that has occurred so far, without having well-established data sharing networks and programs being in place.”
In addition to the regional health information exchange, record locator services, personal health and EHR vendors, eighteen other organizations have signed on to be implementers of the Carequality framework which include new kinds of service providers, consumer apps, and additional EHR vendors, and HIEs.