Health Gorilla, one of the first six organizations approved as Qualified Health Information Networks under the TEFCA framework for nationwide interoperability, has launched a Patient Access solution, which it said would enable consumers to submit queries to national health information networks under the Individual Access Services (IAS) purpose of use.
As Health Gorilla explains, accessing comprehensive data seamlessly from national exchanges has traditionally been limited to specific use-cases, such as treatment. Organizations that provide healthcare services outside of treating patients, such as insurers and life sciences organizations, rely on time-consuming, manual methods of accessing consumers’ medical records, including direct outreach to the patient’s physicians, asking patients to recount their medical history from memory, or requiring patients to provide their EHR patient portal credentials.
“Treatment-based exchange has scaled to hundreds of millions of medical record exchanges every month, and we believe the Patient Access purpose of use, now supported by both the Carequality and evolving national Trusted Exchange frameworks, has the potential to surpass that scale,” said Steven Lane, M.D., M.P.H., chief medical officer at Health Gorilla, in a statement. “This is the next step toward ensuring that patients can securely and seamlessly retrieve their data from a broad network of EHRs and clinics, and ultimately control who can access it.”
Health Gorilla said healthcare support organizations can now leverage Patient Access to enable consumers to seamlessly retrieve and share their comprehensive clinical data from a nationwide network of clinics, hospitals, and EHR systems in near real-time. Patient Access is now available as an out-of-the-box software platform and FHIR-based API for custom applications.
The Patient Access solution includes:
- Real-time, IAL2 consumer identity validation
- One-tap submission of IAS queries to Health Gorilla’s nationwide Health Information Network, CommonWell Health Alliance, and Carequality
- Bi-directional data flows to support consumer-mediated sharing
“After years of planning, we are thrilled to release our Patient Access solution, finally enabling consumers to access their own data from our national health information network,” said Steve Yaskin, CEO and co-founder of Health Gorilla, in a statement. “Healthcare organizations can now access comprehensive data from a nationwide network of EHRs through consenting consumers. The launch of Patient Access opens a new chapter for how patient data will be retrieved and exchanged.”
Health Gorilla and the other applicants accepted for onboarding as a candidate Qualified Health Information Network must successfully complete testing and onboarding before official designation as a QHIN.
