Eight More Health Systems Join Growing Support for Surescripts National Record Locator Service

Nationwide Expansion Improves Doctors’ Ability to Locate and Share Patient Records in Real Time

ARLINGTON, Va. – December 21, 2016 – Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Contra Costa Health Services, Legacy Health, NorthShore University HealthSystem, Novant Health, Parkview Health, Sansum Clinic and Sutter Health are the latest healthcare organizations to go live with Surescripts National Record Locator Service (NRLS), which gives healthcare providers fast and easy access to clinical records and historical patient visit locations. With this latest expansion of the Surescripts network, NRLS continues to gain momentum covering 140 million patients and more than 2 billion patient visits.

Surescripts NRLS operates under the Carequality legal and technical frameworks, allowing data sharing across technology platforms and networks. Giving providers access to critical patient health information within existing electronic health record (EHR) workflows lets providers easily identify and share patient records across disparate systems and geographies, so they can focus more time on patient care.

“By using Surescripts National Record Locator Service, clinicians at these leading health systems can connect to our nationwide network and get critical patient information at the point of care,” said Tom Skelton, Chief Executive Officer of Surescripts. “It’s great to see these organizations take proactive steps to delivering better, safer care by becoming truly interoperable and sharing critical patient data.”

With the expansion of NRLS, thousands of healthcare providers across the country can harness the ability to identify previous care locations, share and retrieve clinical records nationwide and effectively get a more complete picture of patients’ medical history. Since the launch of the service in March 2016, Surescripts has answered almost 6.5 million requests for patient locations and returned over 1.6 million location of care summaries. St. Louis-based SSM Health, with 20 hospitals and more than 60 outpatient care sites in Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma and Wisconsin, was the first organization to go live with NRLS earlier this year.

The new health systems include:

• Cedars-Sinai network’s 886 licensed beds, 2,100 physicians, 2,800 nurses in the Greater Los Angeles area;
• Contra Costa Health Services’ (CCHS) integrated system of health care services, community health improvement and environmental protection. CCHS has one hospital and 11 health centers in Contra Costa County, California.
• 2,100 providers in four NorthShore University HealthSystem hospitals and 130 offices in Illinois;
• Legacy Health’s seven hospitals and more than 50 clinics in the Pacific Northwest;
• 1,380 Novant Health providers in 530 locations across North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia;
• Parkview Health’s eight hospitals and several specialty outpatient facilities in northeast Indiana and more than 220 physicians’ offices in Indiana and Ohio;
• Sansum Clinic’s 200 physicians serving California’s central coast, including Santa Barbara County and surrounding areas; and
• Sutter Health’s 5,000 affiliated doctors and 27 hospitals serving more than 100 communities in Northern California including the San Francisco Bay Area and Greater Sacramento Valley.

“We went live with Surescripts National Record Locator Service only two months ago, and the benefits are clear.” said Lewis Low, MD Chief Medical Officer for Legacy Health. “We’ve already exchanged more than 82,000 patient records through the service, enabling our physicians to have a more complete care history of their patients regardless of where they were treated.”

To accelerate nationwide interoperability, Surescripts recently announced it is offering EHR software vendors free access to NRLS until 2019