Dive Brief:
- Nationwide health data exchange under TEFCA, the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, is now operational, the HHS’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology announced on Tuesday.
- Five Qualified Health Information Networks, or QHINs, completed the onboarding process and are ready for data exchange: eHealth Exchange, Epic Nexus, Health Gorilla, KONZA and MedAllies.
- The go-live marks a significant milestone that’s been years in the making, HHS leaders said at a signing event. “I feel like we're watching the Big Bang occur in 2023,” said Secretary Xavier Becerra.
Dive Insight:
TEFCA is a governance framework for data exchange, setting technical requirements and exchange policies for companies to pull together clinical information sharing networks across the country.
Interoperability is key to improving patient access to their medical records, and ensuring providers and health plans can securely exchange data, HHS and health information exchange leaders said at a signing event on Tuesday.
The effort also supports research to improve public health overall.
“We do this by using data to drive knowledge and progress to better understand things like long COVID, to assess the impact of things like climate change on health and to do the work that we need to do, again, to think about executing against our mission to improve the health and well being of all Americans,” said HHS Deputy Secretary Andrea Palm.
The initiative comes from the 21st Century Cures Act, which was passed in 2016. The TEFCA framework was published last year.
TEFCA’s goal is to create a standardized connectivity infrastructure for providers, plans, patients and public health agencies. The effort builds on national networks, state and regional health information exchanges.
Early this year, the ONC unveiled the first networks that had received approval to be onboarded under TEFCA, promising the process could be done by the end of 2023.
Five were officially designated as QHINs today, tasked with providing services and governance to route queries, responses and messages across networks.
Two other organizations are still working to implement their infrastructures, CommonWell Health Alliance and Kno2, said Micky Tripathi, national coordinator for health information technology. Two more — Surescripts Health Information Network and eClinicalWorks — have applied to become QHINs.
“Remember TEFCA is a network of networks,” Tripathi said. “It's not about building things from scratch. It's about connecting things and helping all of those organizations get to the next level.”
