A new interoperability framework includes legal terms, policy requirements, technical specifications and governance processes to operationalize data sharing for health information exchange (HIE) networks, vendors, payers and others in the healthcare industry to help them improve their connectivity.

The Carequality Interoperability Framework comes from Carequality, a public-private collaborative that facilitates agreement among diverse stakeholders to develop and maintain a common interoperability framework enabling exchange between and among data sharing networks. 

“We need secure health information exchange, where a patient’s story travels with them, to provide safe, efficient, engaged, high quality healthcare,” Matthew Eisenberg, MD, FAAP, medical informatics director of analytics and innovation at Stanford Health Care and co-chair of the Carequality Advisory Council. “This can no longer be accomplished in just one health system, one region or even one network, it must be available everywhere. It has been exciting and humbling to work with Carequality, and so many inspiring people from across the healthcare ecosystem, to build a new framework of trust and share technical best practices so that health information can move wherever we go and our patients go in the pursuit of better health for all.”

HIE was preceded by one-off legal agreements between individual data sharing partners, according to the organization, involving lengthy and costly negotiation and inconsistent experience in quality and quantity of data exchanged. The goal is for organizations who adopt the Carequality Interoperability Framework to establish data sharing partnerships more quickly and uniformly by leveraging existing networks and business relationships. For those physicians already members of an HIE or with access to connectivity through a vendor or service provider, the framework allows these existing operations to access one another.

The initial roll-out of data sharing under the Carequality Interoperability Framework is led by 12 pioneering organizations, who played a key role in development of the entire framework, but particularly the legal terms. The initial roll-out focuses first on query-based exchange of clinical documents, but the framework was developed to support an unlimited variety of use cases.

“The beauty of the framework is that it’s general; it can be applied to any type of content, and any technical architecture,” said Dave Cassel, director of Carequality. “We’re starting with document queries because those capabilities are widely supported in the field, but that’s obviously not the last word in interoperability. The framework provides the governance and trust foundation required for any type of widespread connectivity in healthcare.”