Carequality, eHealth Exchange, and The Sequoia Project (TEFCA RCE) all held their annual meetings in mid-December. Our President has returned with a number of important highlights and updates for 2023 that you should be aware of. Let’s just say there’s a lot going on in terms of nationwide data exchange!

Marilee is a member of the Carequality Advisory Council and also participated as a panelist for a discussion about the adoption of FHIR for nationwide data exchange. For meeting attendees, it was an opportunity to get updated on two important national networks (Carequality and eHealth Exchange) and understand the current state of TEFCA / QHINs (from The Sequoia Project). It really was a wonderful opportunity to reflect on what has been accomplished so far with nationwide health information exchange, and also learn about the opportunities to adopt new national network use cases. It was also great to be together in person with so many leaders focused on the mission of healthcare interoperability!

Carequality Annual Meeting Highlights

As a Carequality Implementer, Zen really values the opportunity to come together as a community. All the panels were highly educational and vital for Implementers who seek to continuously improve success rates for national exchange via Carequality.

During one of the panels, the Carequality Annual Meeting attendees learned that the Social Security Administration (SSA) is live on Carequality – one of the first federal partners to “opt in” to Carequality participation! This is an excellent opportunity for healthcare organizations wanting to partner with SSA to support disability claims processing. The SSA representative spoke about the coming wave of “long Covid” disability claims and how faster processing of these claims really makes a difference for patients. I hope more healthcare organizations take advantage of this great opportunity to dramatically shorten the process of processing disability claims.

Another important session was the opportunity to break into smaller groups for brainstorming work via the “Unconference Session.”There were a lot of great options, but I attended the Carequality Directory group to learn more about the new R4 Directory rollout and exchange ideas on how to improve the content available in the Directory. The new Directory will be able to provide important information, such as what permitted purposes & use cases are supported, as well as support important new use cases, such as the “on the behalf of ” use case coming in early 2023. This one is particularly important to Zen and Zen clients, as we are often filling gaps in existing workflows. The “on the behalf of” new use case, once it is adopted, will allow Zen clients to use Stargate for initiating queries, but direct participants to a different gateway (typically their EHR) for responding queries.

The Sequoia Project Annual Meeting Highlights