Surescripts Drives Significant Growth In Health Information Exchange

Nationwide Growth of Surescripts Record Locator & Exchange Gives Rapidly Increasing Number of Providers Better Access to Patient Clinical History Directly in EHR

Surescripts continues to enable nationwide healthcare interoperability by unlocking access to more than 112 million patient clinical documents between January and August 2018. Fueled by expansion among users of leading electronic health records (EHR) software vendors eClinicalWorks, Epic and NextGen Healthcare, utilization of Surescripts Record Locator & Exchange increased by more than 40 percent since 2017 with 72,000 healthcare providers using the service as of August 2018. Each day, Surescripts processes nearly 13 million transactions—up from 425,702 transactions a day at the end of 2017.

Record Locator & Exchange provides access to clinical history information for 233 million patients—or 71 percent of the U.S. population—and enables healthcare professionals to quickly see within their EHR workflow where patients have previously received care. It locates historical patient clinical records from all 50 states regardless of care setting or EHR. Whether patients receive care from a clinic down the street or while on vacation in another state, the ability to quickly locate, exchange and access clinical history information is key to improving healthcare quality, safety and efficiency.

“This remarkable momentum is enabling the Surescripts Network Alliance® to rapidly benefit from the promise interoperability holds to provide actionable patient intelligence at the point of care,” said Tom Skelton, Chief Executive Officer of Surescripts. “Having Record Locator & Exchange embedded in the EHR is supporting providers across the country in continually improving care quality and patient safety while lowering costs.”

Unprecedented Growth with Immediate Impact
Most recently, Tampa General Hospital and Virginia Hospital Center joined the Surescripts Network Alliance expanding the nationwide reach of Record Locator & Exchange and giving clinicians access to clinical records for patients who visit any other health system connected to Surescripts. These users are also able to connect to the 600,000 healthcare providers across 35,000 clinics and 1,250 hospitals empowered to share health data via Carequality.

Surescripts Record Locator & Exchange leverages the Carequality Interoperability Framework which provides a common set of legal, technical and policy rules for data sharing across locations, settings, networks and technology platforms.

“Doctors, nurses and other clinicians need the full picture of their patients’ medical history in order to make the best possible clinical decisions, and patients increasingly expect their care teams to have it,” said Dave Cassel, Vice President for Carequality at The Sequoia Project. “The Carequality Framework provides connectivity into a huge array of potential data sources, and a record location service can help users take full and efficient advantage of that connectivity. A record location service on its own has value, but when paired with an interoperability framework that empowers real-time access to records, it dramatically increases our ability to improve the efficiency and safety of care delivery.”

NextGen recently implemented Surescripts Record Locator & Exchange for their clients enabled on Carequality, allowing their clinicians to more efficiently find and retrieve patient data nationwide and significantly expanding the reach of the Surescripts network.

“As an industry, we have an obligation to empower providers with the best possible clinical information at the time of care. NextGen Healthcare’s integration with Carequality and Surescripts Record Locator & Exchange is another example of our commitment to creating an even greater level of interoperability within our healthcare system, ultimately resulting in improved care and outcomes,” said Muhammad Chebli, Solutions Director at NextGen Healthcare.”

eClinicalWorks has been using Surescripts Record locator & Exchange to enable their ambulatory practices to connect to other Carequality participants since early 2017. Today, more than 2,200 practices are using the tool to retrieve and send approximately 8 million clinical documents each month.

“Thousands of eClinicalWorks customers are harnessing the power of Surescripts Record Locator & Exchange to locate records more intelligently and precisely, as well as exchange clinical documents from practices and hospitals using other EHRs,” said Tushar Malhotra, Director of Interoperability Strategy and Business Development at eClinicalWorks. “By leveraging Surescripts’ sophisticated patient matching, they have the added ability to more effectively respond to queries from external sources so they can make more informed care decisions and provide higher quality patient care.”

You can learn more about Record Locator & Exchange here, and watch our video.