The Epicenter Blog Data Exchange with EHR

The exchange of health information and ability for separate organizations to work together is known as Interoperability. Interoperability aims to provide resources to achieve better delivery of healthcare for patients. A critique of electronic health records is the lack of communication among IT servers; this issue posses complications for patients who receive care from multiple facilities or companies. The Sequioa Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to the secure transfer of patient information recently launched a program called Carequality Interoperability Framework. The program implements a data exchange principle, meaning different IT companies are able to share patient information from one program to the next. Athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, Epic, NextGen Healthcare and Surescripts are the first five health IT companies to implement the data exchange principles in hopes to move towards a nationwide health information exchange. Once this is "solved" we can start taking a closer look at the poorly designed structure of all these electronic systems. By Ally Dove