To improve healthcare interoperability and patient safety, Surescripts has announced nationwide activation of its National Record Locator Service, a service that gives providers an effective way to obtain a more complete view of a patient’s health history. Surescripts’ National Record Locator Service includes 140 million patients and almost 2 billion, and growing, interactions between those patients and members of their care team.
CVS Health, Express Scripts, Epic and NextGen Healthcare are key partners in a nationwide effort to enable patient record location and standardize record-sharing practices that will lead our industry to a patient-centric and value based system.With the National Record Locator Service, providers using Epic’s Care Everywhere and NextGen® Share software will be able to quickly and efficiently identify and share patient records across disparate systems and geographies.
Operating under the Carequality framework, the National Record Locator Service integrates seamlessly into existing EHR workflows to give providers more complete information about their patients. Providers are therefore able to offer their patients better care through the use of the service, regardless of EHR software affiliation.Express Scripts and CVS Health, the nation’s two largest prescription benefit managers, are important data suppliers of patient visit information to the National Record Locator Service.
Surescripts National Record Locator Service Overview
Surescripts National Record Locator Service is a query and response solution that leverages Surescripts network and Master Patient Index of more than 230 million patients to locate and exchange patient records. The solution will grant physicians conducting research the ability to quickly obtain patient records regardless if the users’ electronic health record systems are compatible with those in which the records are stored. In addition to enabling a full view of available health records, researchers will also have access to patient prescription information. Surescripts Medication History uses both pharmacy benefit manager claims and pharmacy fill data to provide a view of existing and past drug therapies and compliance. Together, Surescripts National Record Locator Service and Medication History solution will facilitate the electronic flow of information necessary to make the Precision Medicine Initiative successful.
White House Precision Medicine Initiative
Last week, Surescripts participated in the White House Precision Medicine Initiative Summit and pledged its support to provide Surescripts’ infrastructure and technology to help the Precision Medicine Initiative aggregate the medical records of the more than one million expected patient volunteers in the National Institutes of Health’s national research cohort. Surescripts plans to leverage its Medication History and National Record Locator Service to give the enrollees of the National Institutes of Health’s national research cohort, once it is launched, the ability to contribute their most current medication information and other health information to the Precision Medicine Initiative cohort electronically, providing critical and timely personalized medical data to the study.