The eHealth Exchange, community of industry partners who share information under a common trust framework, has grown in membership and has seen an incresae in online transactions among participants, Healtheway, the nonprofit public-private collaboration that operates it, announced this week.
According to the annual eHealth Exchange (formerly known as the Nationwide Health Information Network Exchange) annual survey, its membership now includes 41 participants that together represent 800 hospitals, 6,000 mid-to-large medical groups, 800 dialysis centers and 850 retail pharmacies dispersed throughout the nation. Over the course of 2013, several hundred thousand transactions were exchanged among eHealth Exchange participants related to treatment, transitions of care and eligibility for federal benefits, including Social Security. Further, eHealth Exchange participants pushed more than 26 million transactions to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) related to quality data for the End Stage Renal Disease program.
“When we began this work back in 2007, we believed these types of results would one day be possible. Now that the day is here, we’re even more excited about future growth potential for the eHealth Exchange,” Michael Matthews, Healtheway president and chair, said in a statement. “It’s particularly gratifying to witness the increase in transactions throughout the community. Each transaction represents another process simplified, a patient better served or a doctor better informed. And this is just the beginning.”
More might be on the way, says Healtheway. It says more than 60 organizations have applied for going live on the exchange. It expects participation in the eHealth Exchange is to more than double, bringing the full number of participants to over 100.
“The numbers tell a very compelling story,” Mariann Yeager, Healtheway’s executive director, said in a statement. “In just a few months, the eHealth Exchange is expected to connect more than 1,600 hospitals, which is more than 30% of the hospitals in the United States, plus 10,000 medical groups. In total, eHealth Exchange participants are expected serve nearly 100 million patients – almost a third of the country’s population. We started off with an ambitious goal of making the eHealth Exchange a prominent and viable method for secure online e-health transactions in the nation, and these survey results indicate that we’ve made great strides in that direction.”
