Carequality's interoperability network now live

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The Carequality interoperability network is now operational, with data exchanges occurring in four states and poised to expand further, the Sequoia Project announced Tuesday.

The Carequality network leverages existing networks and business relationships to enable data exchange, and includes electronic health record vendors, record locator service providers and other types of networks from the government and private sector. At select sites, providers using athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, Epic, HIETexas, NextGen and Surescripts systems are now sharing information using Carequality’s Interoperability Framework. More than 3,000 clinics and 200 hospitals are live and able to share data, the announcement said.

Carequality is a national consensus-built common interoperability framework created to lower interoperability barriers and enable exchange between and among health data sharing networks. The framework, published in December 2015, is based on principles of trust that cover the legal terms, technical specifications, policy requirements and governance processes to enable interoperability. It has been adopted by 13 pioneering health organizations, and a multitude of additional entities are members, including the American Medical Association, Kaiser Permanente, Carolinas HealthCare System and Walgreens.

Carequality’s universal principles of trust include:

  • Privacy and security of patient information in compliance with HIPAA
  • Nondiscrimination against each other
  • Compliance with the implementation guide for a use case
  • Local autonomy
  • Accountability
  • Cooperation
  • Acceptable use
  • Universal customer flow downs
  • Identity proofing and authentication
  • Information handling transparency

Carequality is advancing the promise and potential of health data sharing among patients and providers as the standard of care, Director Dave Cassel said in the announcement.

“With a single unified health data sharing agreement built upon Carequality’s ground-breaking Principles of Trust, there is no more need to negotiate one-off legal agreements with individual data sharing partners. Carequality implementers--and their clients-can connect more quickly and easily than ever before,” he said.

To learn more:
- read the announcement