Coordinated Care Oklahoma, GE Healthcare, Kno2, Netsmart and OneRecord Advance Health Data Sharing

MCLEAN, VA--(Marketwired - February 25, 2016) - Carequality, an initiative of The Sequoia Project, today announced five new adopters of the Carequality Interoperability Framework. The companies are Coordinated Care Oklahoma, GE Healthcare, Kno2, Netsmart, and OneRecord.

The organizations join athenahealth®, eClinicalWorks, Epic, NextGen Healthcare and Surescripts in contracting to implement the comprehensive Framework.

Carequality is a multi-stakeholder initiative that has brought together public and private sector players from across the healthcare ecosystem to meet the challenge of connecting disparate data sharing networks and platforms. The Carequality community uses a consensus-based process to develop and implement tools that enable seamless connectivity across all participating networks. The Carequality Interoperability Framework consists of legal terms, policy requirements, technical specifications, and governance processes that together make it possible for healthcare to replicate the success other industries have achieved in breaking down barriers between many networks, programs, and platforms.

"The diversity of organizations -- from HIE to consumer access, large to small -- adopting the Carequality Framework really highlights our vision for an interoperability framework that unites the entire healthcare continuum," explained Dave Cassel, director of Carequality. "Enabling patients and providers to access health records from the diverse participants in the Carequality ecosystem is a major step forward, not only for the healthcare experience but also for patient empowerment."

The adoption and timely implementation of the Carequality Interoperability Framework advances the promise of seamless, nationwide interoperability for patients and providers. With a single unified health data sharing agreement built upon Carequality's ground-breaking Principles of Trust, there is no more need to negotiate one-off legal agreements with individual data sharing partners. Carequality implementers -- and their clients -- can connect more quickly and easily than ever before.

A live Carequality demo will run each day at HIMSS 2016, in The Sequoia Project booth (#454). In addition to the demonstration of health data exchange, Mr. Cassel and participants will be available to discuss Carequality's unique network-level connection approach.

Quotes from adopting organizations:

"Our partnership with Carequality has tremendously strengthened our ability to connect with other networks and quite frankly simplified the process in a way that minimizes the politics and time to connect," said Brian Yeaman, MD, Chief Administrative Officer of Coordinated Care Oklahoma. "Expanding the query types to include broader transactions for quality and care improvement initiatives is our next horizon and we will get there with our partner Carequality." 

"Providing customers, clinicians and ultimately patients with improved access to data and information is critical to driving efficient, smart care coordination toward better outcomes in healthcare," said Jon Zimmerman, General Manager, GE Clinical Business Solutions. "The Carequality Framework is an important step in the evolution of interoperability offering an efficient and effective healthcare experience for patients and providers."

"At the heart of Kno2 is a commitment to put interoperability within the reach of every provider across the care continuum and technology supplier in healthcare," said Jon Elwell, CEO of Kno2. "We're very excited to provide the ability to connect our interoperability service subscribers to all the other players available through the Carequality ecosystem. This is a huge win for our partners and providers as well as the healthcare industry."

"Netsmart clients are confronted with a challenging task -- providing critical continuity of care for an estimated 34 million Americans who experience comorbid mental and physical illnesses each year," said Netsmart CEO, Mike Valentine. "Accelerating the Carequality Interoperability Framework makes it possible to supply a picture of the whole person and, in turn, better serve those individuals with multiple mental and physical health conditions."

"We're very excited about the possibilities for direct consumer engagement that the Carequality Framework provides," said Jared Gurfein, COO of OneRecord. "Utilizing the Carequality Framework will allow us real progress towards realizing the goal of true interoperability for patients, enabling them to collect their health records from disparate sources and maintain them in one place." 

About Carequality

Carequality facilitates agreement among diverse stakeholders to develop and maintain a common interoperability framework enabling exchange between and among data sharing networks. Carequality brings together a diverse group of representatives from the private sector and government to come to collective agreement on how to enable data to flow seamlessly between and among networks and providers, much like the telecommunications industry did for linking cell phone networks. For more information, visit www.carequality.org and follow us at twitter.com/carequalitynet.

About The Sequoia Project

The Sequoia Project is a non-profit 501c3 chartered to advance implementation of secure, interoperable nationwide health information exchange. The Sequoia Project supports multiple, independent health IT interoperability initiatives, most notably: the eHealth Exchange, a rapidly growing community of exchange partners who share information under a common trust framework and a common set of rules; and Carequality, a public-private collaborative effort to build consensus among existing data sharing networks regarding technical specifications and best practices, much like the telecommunications industry did for linking cell phone networks. For more information about The Sequoia Project and its initiatives, visit www.sequoiaproject.org. Follow The Sequoia Project on Twitter: @SequoiaProject.