Federal agencies’ electronic medical records are about to get a lot more interoperable with private sector health providers. Agencies like the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs are already members of eHealth Exchange, the country’s biggest health information exchange network. But they’ve now reached legal agreements that will let them start using a much broader health interoperability framework. That’ll add another 20 networks to the federal interoperability picture. Alan Swenson is executive director of Carequality, the nonprofit that runs the framework. He talked with Federal News Network’s Deputy Editor Jared Serbu on the Federal Drive with Tom Temin…
Jared Serbu: Got it. So let’s talk a bit about as a practical matter what the federal government joining actually means. What can a provider do today that he or she couldn’t do six months ago? Or what could they see that they couldn’t see six months ago?
Alan Swenson: Yeah, great question. So the federal agencies, or some of them, already and have been longtime participants in the eHealth Exchange, specifically as a network for exchange. Some of the primary ones being [Department of Defense], [Department of Veterans Affairs], and [the Social Security Administration], there certainly are others that participate. But I know those are the ones that I’ve at least done the most work with in coordinating a lot of this. So what this means is that there are a number of organizations that participate and do disability claims ajudication with the Social Security Administration, or treat, you know, active servicemen and women or veterans and are exchanging records with the DoD and VA on a regular basis. And some of that happens with point to point connections or some of that happens with organizations joining the eHealth Exchange, in order to participate with those federal agencies. Those federal agencies will now have the ability to agree to some flow down terms through the eHealth Exchange, who connects them to Carequality in order to allow them to expand and exchange with other organizations across the entire Carequality framework, not just within the eHealth Exchange network that they’re currently connected to today… Read the full interview here.
