Health IT, Hospitals

Data starts flowing within Carequality Interoperability Framework

This week, Sutter Health added 12 practices to its list of interoperability partners, all with eClinicalWorks EHRs. Sutter, which uses Epic, has been exchanging data among about a dozen area practices on athenahealth's EHR since July 1.

interoprability roadmap

It’s another small step for interoperability, as the Carequality health information exchange collaborative is announcing Tuesday morning that it has hit two milestones in seamless data transfer.

The Carequality Interoperability Framework — considered the “rules of the road” for HIE by at least one participating health IT vendor — is now supporting data transfer for more than 3,000 clinics and 200 hospitals. The Vienna, Virginia-based Sequoia Project, which oversees the Carequality collaborative, said that 13 major healthcare organizations have adopted the framework.

Sacramento, California-based Sutter Health was the first to be ready to go live with exchange on the Carequality Interoperability Framework. The health system, which uses an Epic Systems electronic health record, went live with patient data exchange among about a dozen area practices on athenahealth‘s EHR on July 1.

This week, Sutter added another 12 practices to its list of interoperability partners, all with eClinicalWorks systems, according to Dr. Steven Lane, clinical informatics director of privacy and interoperability at Sutter Health.

“We’re working with a number of local practices on NextGen,” Lane added. He expects to have the Carequality data exchange going with those doctors by the end of the month.

“The beauty of Carequality is that it’s much easier for new organizations to come on board,” said Lane, who practices family medicine at Sutter affiliate Palo Alto Medical Foundation in Silicon Valley. Some of the practices Sutter is sharing data with have just a single patient linkage, Lane said. It would not be worth the effort to build a whole new technical interface between EHRs for those individual patients.

Because the organization has been exchanging data with other Epic users for more than six years, Sutter clinicians now can access outside records for about two-thirds of Sutter’s 3 million patients, Lane said. Expect that number to rise as more practices using participating EHRs seek electronic links with Sutter’s system.

“We’re going to start seeing many new connections,” Lane explained. “I really see this as a tipping point for health information exchange.”

It’s not the full-blown answer for all of healthcare’s interoperability ills, though. For one thing, Carequality partners right now are only able to handle Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture queries — fairly simple clinical summaries, though capabilities will increase in the coming months.

Also, several major EHR vendors, including Cerner and Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, have not signed on to Carequality. Most, with the glaring exception of Epic, do participate in a project called the CommonWell Health Alliance, though that is an interoperability network rather than a set of protocols.

“It’s time to put those vendor-specific networks to sleep,” Lane said.

Other health systems involved in the initial rollout of the Carequality framework include SSM Health, Carolinas HealthCare System and Dignity Health.

Photo: Flickr user Charles Nadeau

 

 

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