TEFCA, QHINs & Surescripts: Our Commitment to Advancing Interoperability

The Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement℠ (TEFCA℠) establishes a universal floor for interoperability across the country. I am more than pleased and excited about this. For me, achieving nationwide interoperability has been one of the defining goals of my career.

Together we’ve collaborated across the public and private sectors to develop the standards necessary for clinical information exchange—the kind of exchange that happens no matter where the patient lives, no matter where they’ve been seen.

• One example of interoperability at work is Record Locator & Exchange. 259,699 clinicians from 59,172 organizations across all 50 states and Washington, D.C., used it to gain access to 1.89 billion clinical documents—in 2023 alone.

Today, Qualified Health Information Networks™ (QHINs™) are coming together under TEFCA’s universal floor for interoperability.

We applied to become a QHIN through our subsidiary Surescripts Health Information Network LLC, and I am proud to share that we have advanced to the Pre-Production Testing and Project Plan Completion phase as a candidate QHIN.

Not Just Information, But the Right Information

Applying to become a QHIN was an important milestone for us. It illustrates our commitment to advancing interoperability in healthcare, a commitment that we have honored across the Surescripts Network Alliance for years.

The Surescripts network was built and runs on the highest standards of access, security and performance. After all, if we’re going to exchange patient information, it must be the right information.

As I wrote above, nearly 260,000 clinicians from coast to coast are using Record Locator & Exchange to gain access to billions of clinical documents, but that’s just one aspect of our work to advance interoperability and clinical information exchange.

Here’s the whole story:

• 23.8 billion transactions crossed our network in 2023.
• More than 99% of the U.S. population (virtually every patient) is represented in our proprietary Master Patient Index, which was developed over 22 years of experience in health information exchange.
• Our directories connect 2.14 million unique healthcare professionals and provider organizations.
• On average, it takes just 48 milliseconds to retrieve an accurate patient match, so providers aren’t waiting in front of spinning dials.
• Our network uptime is 99.995%.

Here’s the message behind that story: The Surescripts Health Information Network is positioned to offer a trusted onramp to TEFCA with straightforward implementation for network participants including health systems, pharmacies, health plans, pharmacy benefit managers, electronic health record (EHR) vendors and others.

“We really are an interoperability company,” says my colleague Justin McMartin, who works in product innovation at Surescripts. “Exchanging health information is everything we do.”

That’s true, but as we work together across the Surescripts Network Alliance, I also hope to make healthcare itself an interoperability industry.