Eight more health systems have now gone live with Surescripts National Record Locator Service (NRLS), which aims to give healthcare providers fast and easy access to clinical records and historical patient visit locations.
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Contra Costa Health Services, Legacy Health, NorthShore University HealthSystem, Novant Health, Parkview Health, Sansum Clinic and Sutter Health are the latest healthcare organizations to go live on the NRLS, which now covers 140 million patients and more than 2 billion patient visits, according to officials.
Surescripts NRLS operates under the Carequality legal and technical frameworks, allowing data sharing across technology platforms and networks. To this end, Carequality recently announced connectivity and collaboration efforts with CommonWell that will aim to provide additional health data sharing options for stakeholders. As part of this agreement, Carequality will work with CommonWell to make a Carequality-compliant version of the CommonWell record locator service available to any provider organization participating in Carequality.
Officials say that with the expansion of NRLS, thousands of healthcare providers across the country can harness the ability to identify previous care locations, share and retrieve clinical records nationwide and effectively get a more complete picture of patients’ medical history.
Since the launch of the service in March 2016, Surescripts has answered almost 6.5 million requests for patient locations and returned over 1.6 million location of care summaries. St. Louis-based SSM Health, with 20 hospitals and more than 60 outpatient care sites in Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma and Wisconsin, was the first organization to go live with NRLS earlier this year.
To accelerate nationwide interoperability, Surescripts recently announced it is offering electronic health record (EHR) software vendors free access to NRLS until 2019
