VIENNA, Va., Oct. 11, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Carequality, a national-level, interoperability trusted exchange framework, is actively seeking input from the healthcare community as it adds support for FHIR-based exchange. Member and non-member stakeholders from across the healthcare continuum are encouraged to participate in the new FHIR Implementation Guide Technical and/or Policy workgroups. The former will concentrate more on specifications and security, while the latter will focus on the “rules of the road.”
“Carequality has demonstrated the power of a nationwide governance framework in connecting health IT networks and services for clinical document exchange,” said Dave Cassel, Executive Director of Carequality. “We believe that the FHIR exchange community will ultimately encounter some similar challenges to those that Carequality has helped to address with document exchange, and likely some new ones as well. We’re eager to engage with stakeholders to map out the details of FHIR-based exchange under Carequality’s governance model.”
With much of the healthcare industry either starting to implement FHIR at some level, or planning to do so, the Carequality community is thinking ahead to the type of broad, nationwide deployments that Carequality governance can enable. The new policy and technical workgroups are expected to work in concert with many other organizations contributing to the maturity and development of FHIR. The workgroups will not duplicate the work that is underway on multiple fronts; including defining FHIR resource specs and associated use case workflows. Instead, the workgroups will focus on the operational and policy elements needed to support the use of these resources across an organized ecosystem.
“The overarching goal of all healthcare interoperability project is to improve outcomes, lower costs, and broadly improve overall population health,” said Cassel. “We believe that adoption of FHIR in the Carequality Interoperability Framework can advance all of these goals by improving the availability of useable clinical information, expanding the scope of exchange, and significantly lowering the costs of participating in interoperable exchange.”
Individuals interested in participating in either or both workgroups should email admin@carequality.org, and indicate which workgroup is of interest.
What is Carequality?
Carequality is a national-level, consensus-built, common interoperability framework to enable exchange between and among health data sharing networks. Carequality brings together diverse groups, including 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, platforms, and geographies.
The Carequality Framework provides the essential elements for trusted national exchange, such as common rules of the road (including a Trusted Exchange Framework), well-defined technical specifications and a participant directory.
For more information, visit www.carequality.org and follow us at twitter.com/carequality.