New EHR Interoperability Framework Touted as Game-Changer

Sara Heath | EHR Intelligence | December 7, 2015

"We know there has been a lot of progress to date and there's just this momentum which continues to grow and push efforts forward. We're on the cusp of seeing really tremendous progress."

Carequality has officially released its Carequality Interoperability Framework to streamline interoperability and health information exchange across the healthcare industry. According to a public statement, the Carequality Interoperability Framework will more thoroughly connect EHRs and HIEs by including important elements such as legal terms, policy requirements, technical specifications, and governance processes. Additionally, this new Interoperability Framework will include past frameworks such as the Sequoia Project’s Principles of Trust.

Participants in Carequality’s initial roll-out to pioneer its approach to EHR interoperability and health data exchange include EHR vendors Epic Systems, eClinicalWorks, NextGen, and Greenway along with providers Intermountain Healthcare and Kaiser Permanente and several HIEs. This new framework promises to bring “previously unseen levels of connectivity,” according to the organization.

The Carequality Interoperability Framework was carefully developed at a slow pace. However, Carequality executives explain that this slow pace was necessary to ensure that the details of the framework were properly developed and would contribute to a more connected health IT and EHR industry. The Carequality Interoperability Framework is expected to richly enhance connectivity between health information management systems by including information, provisions, and policies that no other framework has included before. By combining legal and technical rules of the road, those behind the framework expect it to make significant changes in the health IT industry...