During The Sequoia Project’s Annual Meeting taking place this week, one of its key initiatives, Carequality, reported tremendous growth since it became operational in July of 2016. To date, more than 1,000 hospitals, 25,000 clinics, and 580,000 healthcare providers are connected through the Carequality interoperability framework, representing more than 50% of all healthcare providers in the country.
Carequality is a national-level, consensus-built, common interoperability framework to enable exchange between and among health data sharing networks. Carequality brings together diverse group, including electronic health record (EHR) vendors, record locator service (RLS) providers and other types of existing networks from the private sector and government, to determine technical and policy agreements to enable data to flow between and among networks, platforms, and geographies.
In October 2017 alone, more than 1.7 million documents were shared among healthcare organizations through the Carequality Interoperability Framework. The rate of exchange is rapidly accelerating each month, as two million documents were exchanged in total for the first 12 months, and nearly as many are exchanged now monthly. With existing implementers continuing to onboard clients, and more than a half dozen implementers expected to go live in the first quarter of 2018, there will be continued growth.
“Carequality’s success stems from the core principles of inclusivity and openness we laid out during early planning meetings,” said Dave Cassel, Vice President of Carequality, in a statement.“We brought together competing vendors, providers large and small, HIEs, government agencies, pharmacies, and other types of healthcare organizations, allowing everyone to be heard. Open conversation and debate was encouraged, and we embraced transparency and openness in all processes. As a result, we created a national interoperability framework that works, nationwide. Our implementing networks continue to attract more and more hospitals, practices, and medical groups. Additional networks are coming on line that connect payers, many more providers, and even patients themselves as direct participants in their care. Stay tuned, because the document exchange and participation numbers are going to get a lot bigger.”
