More than 50 percent of U.S. healthcare providers are connected through the Carequality interoperability framework, officials of The Sequoia Project said this week.
During The Sequoia Project’s annual meeting this week, one of its key initiatives, Carequality, reported significant growth since it became operational in July 2016. To date, more than 1,000 hospitals, 25,000 clinics, and 580,000 healthcare providers are connected through the Carequality interoperability framework.
Carequality is a national-level, consensus-built, common interoperability framework to enable exchange between and among health data sharing networks. It brings together 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 and platforms.
In October 2017 alone, more than 1.7 million documents were shared among healthcare organizations through the Carequality Interoperability Framework. Officials attest that 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, officials predict.
“When we first kicked off planning efforts for Carequality in 2014, we knew it was going to be big,” said Mariann Yeager, president of The Sequoia Project, said in a statement. “We had many of the biggest names in healthcare—including healthcare providers, technology vendors, pharmacies and others— committing to making Carequality work and implementing the framework once it was completed. And with today’s revelation about the rapid increase and scale of Carequality’s current operations, we’re delighted.”
