Our KLAS Report Card: Interoperability at Scale

It’s one thing to deliver interoperability and clinical intelligence. It’s quite another to do it at scale. By joining the Surescripts Network Alliance, healthcare organizations tap into seamless communication that improves outcomes and lowers costs. This KLAS Research report shows how.

The need for interoperability grows more urgent every day.

The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the demand for information sharing among a variety of healthcare organizations, including pharmacies and public health agencies. But the information is often out of reach—outside the prescriber’s electronic health record (EHR)—or incomplete, which can delay patient care.

In 2021, KLAS Research interviewed and surveyed a subset of our health system customers about their experience with three tools for interoperability that we designed to address missing or incomplete information: Record Locator & Exchange, Clinical Direct Messaging, and Care Event Notifications.

KLAS Research found that:

• 84% of customers say they are satisfied or highly satisfied with these solutions
• 89% say they would buy the solutions again
• 70% say they saw immediate outcomes as promised by the solutions, including less paperwork, access to records outside of their own EHR, and more accurate information exchange

Partnering with Surescripts allows health systems to tap into a network with industry-leading reliability, security and scalability.

Record Locator & Exchange

“Record Locator & Exchange gives us the ability to automatically search the Surescripts network to identify any records for patients that might be housed in other locations.”

Analyst/Coordinator

Interoperability gaps were the second-most cited barrier to value-based care (just behind a lack of resources) in this 2019 survey of healthcare leaders.

By leveraging the Carequality interoperability framework, Record Locator & Exchange offers access to the most comprehensive nationwide data set of patient visits and clinical document locations from across EHR systems.

Over 197,000 clinicians used Record Locator & Exchange in 2021 to quickly see where their patients received care and to locate medical records from different care settings and EHRs—a 44% increase over 2020. The clinicians accessed a combined 786.3 million links to clinical document sources.

Clinical Direct Messaging

“Surescripts is comfortable with scale, and they are already a major player with active clients on most well-known EMR platforms.”

IT Analyst

As the pandemic took hold, so did the need to track COVID-19 diagnoses.

By using Clinical Direct Messaging—which has more valid directory addresses than any other service—healthcare professionals seamlessly and reliably send and receive information across multiple care collaboration scenarios within their existing workflows.

Nearly 900,000 individuals and organizations, including over 23,000 pharmacies, used Clinical Direct Messaging for secure, HIPAA-compliant exchange of protected health information in 2021. Roughly 144 million Clinical Direct Messaging transactions crossed our network last year, for an 81% increase over 2020.

Care Event Notifications

“Surescripts has created interoperability solutions that support CMS meaningful use requirements.”

Mike Davis

Expert on Market Research & Analysis in Health IT

Care Event Notifications lets clinicians and care managers efficiently track and react to important care events for individual patients and patient populations within their electronic workflows—information that may otherwise slip through the cracks and widen care gaps.

Care Event Notifications also helps providers at health systems meet the interoperability requirements of the Medicare Quality Payment Program in its support of population health and value-based care.