Eleven health data sharing networks will participate in Healtheway's rollout of a new framework--Carequality--aimed at "inter-network" information exchange, Healtheway announced this morning at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's annual conference in Chicago.
The networks include more than 2,000 hospitals and 200,000 physicians, according to Carequality Director Dave Cassel. He told FierceHealthIT that the network can help lower many of the systemic barriers to interoperability that exist in today's current environment.
"We've got a common set of rules of the road," Cassel said. "You don't have to go entity by entity, data-sharing network by data-sharing network, and negotiate an agreement with everybody else. You try to do that, care-wise, and it becomes ridiculous very quickly. But if everyone is simply agreeing to one set of common rules of the road, then that takes that piece out of the equation."
Those rules of the road, Carequality's trust principles, were unveiled last week.
"We're not creating new standards, but we are identifying them, and at times constraining them so that there's less optionality," Cassel said.
Cassel said there will be some minimal fees to the participating data sharing networks that will cover directory maintenance and application costs, but that those costs are at present undetermined. He anticipates "real exchange" taking place within the next six months, but stressed that it's important to get the back end details worked out beforehand.
"We want to do it right," Cassel said. "We're going to spend some time making sure that we can adopt the right legal framework; it has to be standardized across everybody to make sure it's going to work."
The networks participating in the initial rollout are:
- Coordinated Care Oklahoma
- eClinicalWorks eEHX
- Epic Care Everywhere
- Greenway
- HIETexas
- Intermountain Healthcare
- Kaiser Permanente
- Kansas Health Information Network
- Netsmart CareConnect
- Surescripts
- Utah Health Information Network
"The real thrust of this is the power of connecting networks," Cassel said. "You get so much instant scale when you connect guys that are already doing so much within their own networks."
Widespread nteroperability throughout healthcare, of course, is one of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT's primary goals as it pivots its focus away from the Meaningful Use program. ONC currently is reviewing comments on its interoperability roadmap, published in January.
To learn more:
- read the Healtheway/Carequality announcement