Nationwide Insights on Trusted Health Intelligence Sharing

Healthcare runs on relationships.

From individual clinicians to all the organizations that research, deliver and pay for care, it takes many different hands to keep American patients’ health on track.

When these stakeholders are misaligned, things fall apart. Information gaps and process friction interrupt the care journey.

But underneath all the complex—and sometimes broken—processes, one thing unites everyone involved: the patient.

That’s why we convene the Surescripts Network Alliance®—that is, the people and organizations who share and access health intelligence through Surescripts. We bring together nearly all electronic health records (EHR) vendors, pharmacy benefit managers, pharmacies and clinicians in the U.S., plus health plans, life sciences companies, long-term and post-acute care organizations, patient access vendors, specialty pharmacy organizations and veterinary technology vendors.

With the power of this monumental force, we’re taking on some of the biggest challenges in healthcare. And in 2025, the Surescripts Network Alliance made a monumental impact for patients and those who care for them.

Together, we made health intelligence sharing even more secure and trustworthy. We made prescribing simpler and more collaborative, helping patients access and afford their medications. We expanded automation to handle an increasing number of prior authorizations in seconds.

This is exactly the kind of progress and collaboration we need to carry us into a fast-changing future. Together, we can inform and accelerate decisions, so patient care stays on track no matter what.

No matter where patients are treated, safe, clear prescriptions should come standard.

Over the past two decades, the Surescripts Network Alliance has worked to make this happen at massive scale across care settings, including long-term and post-acute care, specialty pharmacies and even veterinary practices.

But we can’t stop there. With 3 in 10 prescribers and pharmacists reporting that they struggle with limited staff resources, there’s still room to help care teams cut time from administrative work and focus more of their energy on patients.

In 2025, we brought even more collaboration and efficiency into the prescribing process, supporting better patient safety, medication adherence and health outcomes.

E-Prescribing

Compared to manual prescribing, E-Prescribing has major benefits for data quality and care team efficiency—but that’s just the start. It also unlocks the ability to write prescriptions that are fully informed by patients’ prescription benefit information, the cost at their preferred pharmacies and the other medications they’ve been prescribed.

All of these factors make an impact on medication adherence and safety: up to a 10% increase in first-fill medication adherence compared to paper prescriptions—and up to 20.5% when combined with the coverage insights of Eligibility and Formulary.

In 2025, 1.39 million prescribers used E-Prescribing (a 4.0% increase from 2024), as did virtually all pharmacies. Electronic Prescribing for Controlled Substances was enabled for 84.4% of e-prescribers and 98.3% of pharmacies on the Surescripts network.

Improving safety with quantity unit of measure (QUOM)

QUOM is a prescription field denoting the total amount of a medication to be dispensed (such as “15 grams,” “30 capsules” or “one syringe”). This is important to ensure patients receive the exact dose the prescriber intended, and e-prescriptions cannot be sent without a QUOM. If the QUOM is ambiguous, pharmacy staff must reach out to the prescriber to confirm it, potentially causing delays.

In 2025, nearly all prescriptions sent over the Surescripts network contained a valid QUOM, but rates varied across medication types.

Mapping medication trends

As the nation’s most powerful health intelligence network, Surescripts has unique insight into prescription trends and barriers across the U.S. One trend our Data & Analytics team tracked in 2025 is the continuing rise in prescriptions for GLP-1 agonists (GLP-1s).

Used to treat Type 2 diabetes and obesity, prescriptions for these medications have skyrocketed in recent years. Data from 2025 shows continued growth in nearly all U.S. states and Puerto Rico. Only Oklahoma and West Virginia saw declines.

There are many reasons to work closely across organizations to manage patient health.

Clinicians need to know about the other care their patients have received in order to develop safe and effective treatment plans. Care managers need insight into care activity to plan effective patient outreach. To achieve value-based care results, providers and health plans need to stay in sync.

All of these things require interoperability. In 2025, the Surescripts Network Alliance worked to deliver a more comprehensive and connected view of patient care, when and where it’s needed most. This work included the launch of our First-Fill Abandonment solution, which proactively monitors new prescriptions sent across the Surescripts network and notifies providers when patients don’t pick them up.

On a larger scale, Surescripts Health Information Network LLC^TM, a subsidiary of Surescripts, was designated as a Qualified Health Information Network^® (QHIN^TM) under the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement^TM (TEFCA^TM) in April. QHINs securely route queries, responses and messages across networks for healthcare stakeholders including patients, their care teams, pharmacies, hospitals, health systems, payers and public health agencies.

To further advance pharmacy interoperability, Surescripts also cofounded The Sequoia Project’s Interoperability Matters Pharmacy Workgroup. By sharing guidance for data exchange, the workgroup will help give pharmacists more power to fill care gaps with expanded clinical services.

Clinical Direct Messaging

Clinical Direct Messaging lets healthcare professionals securely exchange protected health information at the point of care, at pharmacies and during care management. In 2025, 1.08 million healthcare professionals and organizations (an 11.8% increase from 2024) used Clinical Direct Messaging to coordinate care and manage many other kinds of time-sensitive healthcare communications, including sending electronic case reports for infectious diseases to public health agencies.

Medication History

Medication History delivers medication history information from pharmacies and PBMs to clinical and care management workflows. With a comprehensive understanding of patients’ prescriptions, providers can safely and confidently prescribe new medications, and care managers can quickly spot adherence concerns.

Ambulatory care: Care delivered in an outpatient setting. Medication History for Ambulatory is used by clinicians in these care settings to inform prescribing decisions.

Controlled substances: Substances that are regulated under federal law based on the substance’s medical use, potential for abuse, and safety or dependence liability. Electronic Prescribing for Controlled Substances includes safety and security measures to help meet regulatory requirements around these substances.

Eligibility: Provides information about a patient’s prescription benefit coverage. Eligibility is also used to help identify patients in order to exchange a wide variety of other health intelligence.

Formulary: Provides data on medications covered by a patient’s prescription benefit plan. This includes information on formulary tiers—with higher or preferred tiers having the best coverage and lowest cost to the patient—as well as coverage requirements such as prior authorization and step therapy.

Interoperability: The ability of different information technology systems to work together. In healthcare, interoperability makes it possible to exchange information such as clinical records and price and benefit data among different parties—such as providers, pharmacies, PBMs and health plans—that use different technology platforms.

Long-term and post-acute care: Care delivered outside of acute care settings to patients who need significant support with rehabilitation, recovery or ongoing assistance with daily living. This can include skilled nursing facilities, long-term care hospitals, nursing homes and assisted living facilities as well as home healthcare services.

Master Patient Index: A database of patient data that makes it possible to identify healthcare information for the correct individual. The Surescripts Master Patient Index uses referential matching to capture and merge identifying information from different sources in order to create more complete records for higher accuracy.

Medication adherence: The extent to which patients take their medications as prescribed. Nonadherence can happen when a patient doesn’t pick up a prescription (known as primary nonadherence) or doesn’t take all doses as prescribed (known as secondary nonadherence). Real-Time Prescription Benefit can help avoid cost-related nonadherence of both kinds by sharing price information and less costly alternatives. Medication History can help address primary nonadherence by identifying when prescribed medications were not picked up.

Medication management: The process of optimizing a patient's medication regimen. Pharmacists and other healthcare professionals often work with patients and their doctors to ensure that medications are safe, cost-effective and aligned with patients’ health needs.

Medication reconciliation: The process of identifying all the medications a patient is taking so that appropriate medication therapy can be administered, typically during hospital admission or other transitions of care.

Network uptime: The percentage of time that a network can be accessed by users. Uptime is the inverse of downtime.

Patient access programs: Programs funded by life sciences companies that provide support to patients taking specific medications. This may include financial assistance as well as education, help navigating coverage and other resources.

Prescription abandonment: When a medication is prescribed but never picked up, it is considered abandoned. Prescription abandonment often indicates that a patient has encountered cost or coverage problems or other barriers to adherence.

Primary coverage indicator: A feature of Surescripts Eligibility that indicates which benefit plan should be used first when patients have multiple coverages.

Prior authorization: The process of obtaining approval from a payer before a specific treatment can be provided and covered. For prescriptions, prior authorization typically requires clinical information to help confirm that the medication is necessary and appropriate for the patient.

Prior authorization appeal: When a prior authorization request is denied, the provider who submitted it has the opportunity to appeal the decision. This may involve submitting additional clinical documentation or discussing the case via phone call with the health plan.

Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN™): A health information network that has been approved to support nationwide health information exchange through TEFCA. Organizations such as health systems, public health agencies, payers and health IT vendors can connect to a QHIN of their choice in order to exchange health information with those participating in any other QHIN.

Sig: Directions that tell patients how a medication should be taken (such as “Take one capsule by mouth daily”). The Sig is typically printed on the prescription label.

Specialty medications: A category of medications defined by high costs and often high complexity. Specialty medications may require extensive clinical documentation as well as special protocols for administration, handling and storage. As a result, they often must be filled by specialty pharmacies equipped to manage these medications. Different organizations define specialty medications in slightly different ways. Surescripts identifies specialty medications based on a specialty medication compendium created by internal experts in alignment with industrywide definitions.

Structured & Codified Sig: A standardized, machine-readable format for patient directions defined by the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs. Use of Structured & Codified Sig helps reduce ambiguity and errors that could disrupt prescription workflows and harm patient safety.

Transaction: An individual instance of sending or accessing information via the Surescripts network. Transactions may be triggered by an individual or automated by a connected system.

Value-based care: An approach to assessing and reimbursing care that is based on measures of quality, instead of being tied only to services delivered. Quality measures may incorporate factors such as medication adherence, patient outcomes and patient experience. Value-based care programs are often centered on specific chronic conditions, such as diabetes or heart disease.