Dean Riggott Photography
Surescripts
If you’ve followed the news lately, it’s no surprise that the opioid epidemic is a serious problem in America today. At this year’s HIMSS conference, Surescripts demonstrated how our National Record Locator Service (NRLS) is helping fight it. More than 7,000 conference-goers had the opportunity to see NRLS in action at the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase as Surescripts demonstrated the service’s ability to identify patients exhibiting potential drug seeking behaviors.
The HIMSS Interoperability Showcase demonstrated, in real time, the exchange and use of data through interoperability profiles and standards with live products currently in the marketplace. Surescripts has participated in the showcase for many years because it’s a great way to show true interoperability between leading health information technology vendors and solutions providers.
NRLS is the industry’s strongest, farthest reaching and most robust record locator service. It delivers actionable intelligence to providers via their electronic health records (EHRs) in the form of real-time patient care histories from multiple care settings, specialties and locations, nationwide. Providers can seamlessly access this information at the point of care to get more complete views of their patients’ health.
Photo Credit: Tone Southerland
This year’s demo showed how five EHR vendors—eClinicalWorks, Epic, MEDITECH, Netsmart and NextGen—could allow their providers to use NRLS to exchange clinical documents while following a patient through a multitude of visits. Since providers could freely exchange the patient’s data across EHR systems via NRLS, they were able to identify her as having an opioid abuse disorder. This allowed them to treat her underlying pain condition while attending to her opioid dependence.
Demonstration attendees included NRLS early adopters, interested prospects from various vendors and health systems, and industry leaders from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC). The audience seemed to genuinely understand the power of NRLS and the conversations I had almost always started with, "So it seems like Surescripts NRLS is what ties all of these vendors together."
View a PowerPoint presentation of the demonstration for more information, and feel free to download and share it.
To learn more about how NRLS increases interoperability to improve patient care while saving time and money, visit surescripts.com/NRLS.