National Interoperability Organizations
The Velocity Interoperability Blog and Velocity Interoperability Podcast are sponsored by Velocity Health Informatics. Velocity provides both data quality and data integration as a service offerings to ensure that healthcare providers access the correct patient record with the right data for each patient they serve.
Over the past 3 years as I have interviewed over 50 CIOS on intrepidNOW Healthcare, and the single most common topic discussed is interoperability, or more accurately, the need for interoperability at the health system level and beyond, integrating their own systems, medical devices, and now IoT and #mHealth devices and integrating with everyone else’s EMRs via HIEs or other methods.
This probably isn’t first time or place that you’ve heard my opinion that the great failure of Meaningful Use was that we did not require Interoperability in any of the Stages. I believe that it should have been included in Stage 1. I am sure that there are many political and technical reasons that the powers that be ignored the most important requirement of our EHR data for each of us 300 million Americans/Patients, the ability for all data to be accesses from anywhere. It simply does not make sense to me that we would spend $38B on EHRs and not require that they interoperate.
Our Velocity Interoperability Series explores many aspects of Health IT Interoperability in the US and today we will attempt to explore National Interoperability Organizations.
What National Interoperability Organizations exist?
The two established National Interoperability Organizations are The Sequoia Project and CommonWell Health Alliance.
The Sequoia Project was chartered in 2012 “to advance the implementation of secure, interoperable nationwide health exchange” and the ONC transitioned transitioned management of its eHealth Exchange to The Sequoia Project for maintenance. In 2014, The Sequoia Project rolled out it’s initial version of Carequality. Carequality “is a public-private collaborative building consensus among health IT data exchange programs to develop a common interoperability framework enabling seamless exchange among networks”. The first vendors to sign up for Carequality’s to implement it’s data exchange principles: athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, Epic, NextGen Healthcare and Surescripts. Many more vendors have signed up since.
For more information The Sequoia Project, listen in to these recent intrepidNOW Healthcare interviews with:
In 2013, CommonWell’s seven founding members (Allscripts, Athen Health, Cerner, Evindent, CPSI, Greenway Health, McKesson and Sunquest) set out to achieve “cross-vendor interoperability that assures provider access to health data regardless of where care occurs.” CommonWell initially rolled out in 4 states in 2015 and is now in all 50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rick with over 4700 providers and 50 members organizations. The idea is that if you have a product from one of the member organizations, you will be able to share data from that product to the rest of the CommonWell “network”. If you have products that are not from one of the member organizations (i.e. Epic), you will have to find another solution for full interoperability, which leads to…
For more information, checkout intrepidNOW Healthcare’s CommonWell TV coverage at HIMSS16
In December 2016, CommonWell and Carequality (Sequoia) announced agreement to increase Health IT connectivity nationwide. Certainly it would not be good to have 2 national interoperability efforts that are not interoperable, so this is viewed by many as long overdue. Let’s hope that CommonWell and Carequality are successful in creating robust interoperability without limitations as soon as possible.
What about HIEs?
Some (a small number) states, regions and states have successfully deployed Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) to share data, but many HIEs have failed and many locations never had one at all. Most of the “successful” HIEs don’t have a sustainable business model and clearly HIEs won’t provide the long term answer for interoperability, though several are successfully providing regional interoperability. (See GLHC and MaEHC)
For more information on a couple of the successful HIE’s, listen in to these recent intrepidNOW Healthcare interviews with:
- Great Lakes Health Connect
- Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative Interview 1
- Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative Interview 2
Are there any other organizations?
The Carin Alliance is another membership based organization started in 2016 by David Blumenthal, David Brailer, Aneesh Chopra, and Mike Leavitt, to unite industry leaders in advancing the adoption of consumer-directed exchange across the U.S. There is some excitement in a new model for interoperability given the lessons learned by these thought leaders, however, it is still to early for them to tell.
For more information, listen in to this recent intrepidNOW Healthcare interview with the Carin Alliance.
Join the Conversation
Please jump in and participate as your input will only improve our chances of success. The fine folks at Velocity are interested in exploring and improving our current states of medical record data quality and interoperability and this post is the first of many posts and (coming soon) podcasts reporting on current status and solutions. PLEASE bookmark this site and provide your input and feedback on a regular basis!
The Velocity Interoperability Blog and Velocity Interoperability Podcast are sponsored by Velocity Health Informatics. Velocity provides both data quality and data integration as a service offerings to ensure that healthcare providers access the correct patient record with the right data for each patient they serve.
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