Will Carequality Lead EHR Vendors to EHR Interoperability?

"The way we are going to get to interoperability faster is not by having each individual customer try to integrate with other customers."

The Sequoia Project and Carequality have taken significant steps forward in advancing EHR interoperability by brokering agreements with several health IT vendors to implement its framework for point-to-point health information exchange. Five big names in health IT — Epic Systems, athenahealth, eClincalWorks, NextGen Healthcare, and Surescripts — recently signed on to be the first implementers of the Carequality Interoperability Framework, the legal agreement that streamlines the sharing of health information between these various systems.

Three in particular were vocal in calling attention to the significance of being an early adopter of the legal framework. "The industry needs to evolve from simply exchanging information to meaningfully sharing it and introducing new workflows to access it," Doran Robinson, athenahealth Vice President of Healthcare Transactions, said last week. "We believe that efforts such as Carequality, CommonWell and the Argonaut Project are making marked progress on mobilizing health care information in meaningful and secure ways.

His comments were echoed by head of eClinicalWorks, CEO Girish Navani. "As vendors, we have a responsibility to make information accessible to patients and their physicians," he told EHRIntelligence.com. "The work done as part of the Carequality Framework will speed the time from end user agreements to being able to go live with real interoperability between disparate systems. This initiative will aid our customers in sharing pertinent health data and providing better care."...