The national trusted exchange networks (like Carequality, eHealth Exchange and Commonwell Alliance) allow for the secure sharing of health information between healthcare providers, payers, and other organizations, and are an important tool for improving patient care and outcomes.
Unfortunately for those without experience, implementing the healthcare messaging technologies required by the networks can be challenging. This is particularly true for healthcare technology vendors trying to provide their clients with easy national network access. Whether you are a legacy vendor, a startup, or a healthcare organization trying to fill technology or workflow gaps, the complex security and smoke testing required for national network onboarding can be time consuming and costly.
Here are three ways you can skip right to the front of the line and start having an immediate impact on your stakeholders or customers:
#1 Optimize your integration:
Building your own connectivity to the networks can be a monumental task, both in terms of time and cost. Just like other interoperability projects, the adoption rate and overall success of national network connectivity rely on seamless integration and an efficient user experience. Choosing a vendor that can provide you with a simple but flexible integration path (like RESTful APIs) along with the ability to customize the workflow based on your users’ needs, will streamline and optimize your integration, and save you both money and time while onboarding.
#2 Understand the details to be ready for onboarding:
Do research about the networks you are looking to join. Validate their supported use cases, and review any data sharing agreements or other legal documents that need to be executed. Be certain that you understand both the technical requirements (security testing, partner testing, etc.) and procedural requirements to complete the onboarding. When looking for an interoperability partner, be sure they can help you align those details with your specific needs. A good partner will help you navigate the entire national network onboarding process and shorten your timeline to go live, while providing you with invaluable subject matter expertise in deciding which network is right for you and what use case(s) and data flows will work best for your needs.
#3 Don’t accept “this is just the way it works”:
One common mistake organizations make when connecting to the national networks is not having a game plan for what happens when things don’t work the way you expect. Getting a high volume of “not found” results for patient queries where you expect a positive result can be frustrating, especially when working with a platform or vendor that doesn’t provide visibility to what is happening behind the scenes. We call this the “black box” problem. When choosing a national network vendor or platform, ensure that you will have sufficient logs or query manifests to be able to understand why things aren’t working as you would expect. This allows for a better end user experience when you go live. Also look for advanced business logic, such as automated retries when one or more participant endpoints fail to respond to a valid query.
In Summary
National networks provide access to a vast amount of data that can improve patient care and community health; for example: allowing a hospital to quickly query a provider for the complete medical record when a chronically ill patient has an ER visit or hospital admission. While the promise of newer standards is on the horizon, the reality is that national network data exchange will be relying on a mix of new and older style healthcare messaging patterns for many years, due to the slow pace of updating widely used legacy systems. And this simply makes it hard and expensive to tackle on your own.
This is why an interoperability platform is a very useful approach to accelerate access to the national trusted exchange network like Carequality and eHealth Exchange. Choosing a platform vendor that provides you with excellent subject matter expertise, solves real world problems, and enables the flexibility your organization requires, is what will move you to the front of the line.
How can Zen Help?
We believe unlocking healthcare data is critical in the effort to improve health outcomes. Our mission is to make it easier for organizations and healthcare vendors to exchange data by providing a reliable, scalable, healthcare interoperability platform. Zen has a stellar reputation for its subject matter expertise in interoperability, is a Carequality Implementer, and has connected many clients to eHealth Exchange.
The Stargate IHE Gateway accelerates your access to eHealth Exchange and Carequality, unlocking 600,000+ providers, 4,200+ hospitals, 70+ HIEs, and 5 Federal Partners.*
Simply use our Stargate APIs to fast track integration efforts. Stargate APIs are designed to provide flexible integration options, as different clients need different data flows and business logic.
Can’t support our APIs? Not a problem. For clients who need other integration options, our flexible adapter model supports custom integration patterns. With Zen’s team of expert integration engineers, we do the heavy lifting and “meet you where you are” from an interoperability perspective.
