From the new Interoperability Pledge to more vendors joining interoperability frameworks, here are five recent announcements related to healthcare interoperability.
1. HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell announced the Interoperability Pledge during HIMSS16. The new initiative presents healthcare providers with three core commitments, and already some of health IT's biggest names are joining the cause. Big names amongst the vendor pledges include Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, Epic, McKesson and MEDITECH.
2. Health information network Surescripts launched its National Record Locator Service nationwide. The service includes records for 140 million patients and has achieved nearly 2 million interactions between patients and healthcare providers. CVS Health, Epic, Express Scripts and NextGen Healthcare have partnered with Surescripts in an effort to move forward with interoperability.
3. Five more organizations adopted The Sequoia Project's Carequality Interoperability Framework.
The new adopters include:
• Coordinated Care Oklahoma
• GE Healthcare
• Kno2
• Netsmart
• OneRecord
4. In less than three years, Allscripts' open application programming interfaces have exchanged data more than 1 billion times, the largest documented use of modern APIs in healthcare, the company reports. The data shares count when an application either receives or delivers data to an Allscripts clinical solution. In 2016 alone, Allscripts expects to facilitate 1.6 billion data shares.
5. CommonWell Health Alliance's cross-vendor interoperability services for the post-acute care market are now available. Brightree, Cerner and McKesson will be amongst the first of the organization's members to deploy these solutions.