Surescripts Continues to Advance and Support Health Care Interoperability

As noted by National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo, M.D., private sector partnerships and mutual accountability are two of the main drivers for us as a Nation to achieve true interoperability across the country.  At Surescripts, we applaud ONC for keeping the focus where it counts through the development of the Interoperability Roadmap and by obtaining the pledges of community commitment and support.

Collaboration-enabling technologies, such as Surescripts’ National Record Locator Service, which are made possible by our network, are saving lives and improving quality, all while reducing costs and keeping data secure.  We are proud to be an industry backbone for safe and secure data exchange, and our history as the facilitator of interoperability means that we are leading by example.  We remain dedicated to this mission each and every day.

As we have officially committed to the ONC, we support the push to improve interoperability through consumer access, no data blocking, and implementation of standards, and Surescripts pledges to:

• Make information exchange and data access attainable for all, regardless of users’ technology platforms, by continuing to foster industry collaboration.  With providers, EHRs, pharmacies, and PBMs working together to implement solutions like the National Record Locator Service and Medication History, clinicians have a fast, easy way to locate patient records and reconcile patient medications, regardless of geography or EHR system.  Today, nearly half of all hospitals in the country depend on real-time access to patient medication history data, saving large hospitals more than $1M each year. Through partner collaboration and superior support, we will continue to enable data exchange, enhance patient safety, lower costs, and improve quality.
• Uphold the standards-based framework upon which our company was built.  From the very beginning, our network was developed according to standards adherence and technology neutrality—whether e-prescribing, clinical messaging, or the electronic prescribing of controlled substances (ECPS)—and these transactions will remain standards-based so that interoperability advances and data exchange continues.
• Strengthen our longstanding partnerships with physicians, nurses, pharmacists, PBMs, EHR companies, software vendors, and others to ensure that health data can be accessed and managed not only by providers, but by patients as well.  Information is valuable only if it is actionable; and patients can take action only when the care community can securely exchange and provide access to their data.

And as we kick off HIMSS16, we also are thrilled to announce a significant milestone in our interoperability efforts with our industry partners.  Today, our National Record Locator Service, which gives providers a streamlined, efficient way of locating a patient’s medical records regardless of geography or EHR system, has added 140 million patients and almost 2 billion interactions between those patients and members of their care team.  CVS Health, Express Scripts, Epic, and NextGen Healthcare are key partners in this nationwide effort to enable patient record location and standardize our record-sharing practices.  On Tuesday, we’re hosting a panel on the topic at HIMSS, moderated by John Halamka.

We’ve been making interoperability a reality for over a decade, with over 1.5 billion electronic prescriptions sent over our network in 2015 alone. To the ONC, the industry at large, and each of our community care partners, we reaffirm our commitment to ensure the delivery of mission-critical health information to the right place at the right time. We will remain focused on enabling the exchange of critical health information affordably and securely for the benefit of all who are connected and the patients they serve.

To learn more about the National Record Locator Service, stop by the Surescripts booth (#2160) at HIMSS on Tuesday, March 1^st at 4:15 PM for a panel discussion moderated by John Halamka, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Health System and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, along with executives from CVS Health, Epic, NextGen Healthcare, SSM Health and Surescripts.